Dr Aditya Kelkar said they presented a challenging surgical case of recurrent optic disc pit maculopathy in a child who was treated using an amniotic membrane graft.
City-based ophthalmologist and Director of the National Institute of Ophthalmology Dr. Aditya Kelkar has won the prestigious Rhett Buckler Award for the second time in a row at the 39th meeting of the American Society of Retina Specialists (ASRS) held at San Antonio in Texas, USA.
ASRS celebrates the talents, observational skills, innovation, and creativity of retina specialists across the world by analyzing videos of their surgeries and offers the prestigious Rhett Buckler Award, considered an ‘Oscar’ in the field, for the best videos. The award includes a statuette custom-sculpted by RS Owens & Company, which manufactures the Oscar statuettes.
“This year, it was more special as the video was also awarded ‘the best of the show’,” Dr. Kelkar said, adding that they presented a challenging surgical case of recurrent optic disc pit maculopathy in a child who was treated using an amniotic membrane graft.
The nine-year-old girl from Pune had a hole in the optic nerve that led to retinal detachment in one eye. After conventional surgery, the girl showed good results for nine months. However, there were minor issues and subsequently they used graft from the amniotic membrane preserved in labs. “It acts like a plug that seals the optic nerve hole,” Dr Kelkar said.
“We modified our technique with the use of larger graft and also guided by the intra operative optical coherence tomography. The machine basically helped us to understand whether the membrane had snugly fit the hole,” he said. The tool was acquired by NIO last year.
“This helped us so that we could obviate the need for additional laser to retina or additional tamponade like silicone oil or gas. This allowed the child to regain vision within 48 hours,” said Dr Kelkar who prepared the video along with Dr Mounika Bolshetty of NIO.
Last time, Dr Kelkar won the award for a video on the surgery of a young man with a dislocated cataract and retinal detachment.
Article Referred from Indian Express
