Professor Srinivas R. Sadda: unlocking the secrets of choroid

Expert introduction

Dr. Srinivas R. Sadda (Figure 1) is Associate Professor of Ophthalmology at the Keck School of Medicine, the University of Southern California, Doheny Eye Institute. He is Director of the Medical Retina Unit, Ophthalmic Imaging Unit, Retinal Cell Replacement Laboratory, and Doheny Image Reading Center. He obtained his MD from Johns Hopkins University and a bachelor of science (Cellular and Molecular Biology) from the University of Michigan. He served as an intern at the W. Beaumont Hospital and returned to Wilmer Eye Institute for his ophthalmology residency, followed by fellowships in neuro-ophthalmology and medical retina at Wilmer.

Figure 1 Professor Srinivas R. Sadda, President and Chief Scientific Officer, University of California, Los Angeles, USA.

Dr. Sadda’s research interests include advanced retinal imaging technologies, image processing algorithms, image analysis and grading, retinal electrophysiology, retinal and stem cell transplantation, phototransduction transfer, and retinal prosthetics. In pursuit of these interests, Dr. Sadda has been the principal investigator on more than 30 trials, including phase III studies of ranibizumab, preservative-free triamcinolone acetonide, and a dexamethasone posterior segment drug delivery system. He has more than 315 publications in peer-reviewed journals and over 280 published abstracts.

Dr. Sadda’s awards and honors are a Research to Prevent Blindness Physician-Scientist Award, a Senior Honor Award from the American Society of Retina Specialists, a Senior Achievement Award and Secretariat Award from the American Academy of Ophthalmology, John H. Zumberge Research and Innovation Award, and the Macula Society Young Investigator Award. He has been named to the Best Doctors of America list for several consecutive years.

Editor’s note

As a retina specialist with a particular interest in quantitative, automated retinal image analysis; retinal substructure assessments; advanced retinal imaging technologies, Dr. Sadda has been has been the principal investigator on more than 30 trials, including phase III studies of ranibizumab, preservative-free triamcinolone acetonide, and a dexamethasone posterior segment drug delivery system. We were honored to have an interview with Professor Sadda, President and Chief Scientific Officer, University of California to share his viewpoints about the application and the latest development of imaging technologies in clinical practice.

When mentioned the challenges and limitations of imaging techniques, Professor Sadda also shared his opinion. “Regards to hand-held optical coherence tomography (OCT), one of the new developments of swept source OCT, through the technology now we have devices such as CE marking etc. So I think it represents a big advance and it’ll get progress in the future. In general, OCT angiography is exciting, however, that technology has limitations in relation to artifacts, such as projection artifact, segmentation artifact. In fact, we currently can’t see the leakage as we have limited dynamic information and we don’t have lot of information about velocity. Therefore, I hope that these limitations could be overcome in the future”. For more detailed content, please enjoy the interview (Figure 2).

Figure 2 Professor Srinivas R. Sadda: unlocking the secrets of choroid (1). Available online: http://www.asvide.com/articles/1689

Interview questions:

• What do you think is the biggest change that these imaging technologies bring to disease treatment?
• How does the application of these techniques in clinical practice?
• What are the challenges and limitations of these techniques?
• Would you like to share the latest exploration in the area of imaging technology in your lab?

Acknowledgments

Funding: None.

Footnote

Provenance and Peer Review: This article was commissioned by the editorial office for the series "Meet the Professor" published in Annals of Eye Science. The article did not undergo external peer review.

Conflicts of Interest: Both authors have completed the ICMJE uniform disclosure form (available at http://dx.doi.org/10.21037/aes.2017.08.05). The series “Meet the Professor” was commissioned by the editorial office without any funding or sponsorship. Nikki Ling and Elaine Xu report that they are full-time employees of AME publishing company (publisher of the journal). The authors have no other conflicts of interest to declare.

Ethical Statement: The authors are accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.

Open Access Statement: This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which permits the non-commercial replication and distribution of the article with the strict proviso that no changes or edits are made and the original work is properly cited (including links to both the formal publication through the relevant DOI and the license). See: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.

References

1. Ling N, Xu E. Professor Srinivas R. Sadda: unlocking the secrets of choroid. Asvide 2017;4:375. Available online: http://www.asvide.com/articles/1689

(Science Editor: Nikki Ling, Elaine Xu, AES, aes@amegroups.com)