New Instrument in the office

With our continued belief and incorporation of the best technology to maintain top-quality care, we have added OCT to the office! Dr. Chappel will be honest here and wishes we had this device since we opened. Some new ones were coming out that I was more interested in than the current models. There were more pressing instruments needed when we opened, and this device is more of a nice-to-have than a required one. Better late than never is what I always say! This will help detect conditions like Macular degeneration and glaucoma earlier. It works wonderfully for retinal disease. With the advanced corneal pachymetry and new data, it helps detect earlier keratoconus too, which is a corneal disease. So what is an OCT you propably wonder? Well, OCT stands for Optical Coherence Tomography... that probably doesn't help at all. OCT what it does is machine that basically takes a photo and it can analazye all the retinal layers and produces an image like this.

With this image the doctors can examine all the layers of retina to confirm all layers look intact (the photo is normal retinal image of fovea/macula area). To Dr. Chappel this is one of those machines that works like magic. Dr. Chappel has some ideas how this can work but they could be 100% wrong, and magic sounds more fun. In a study done by Optos (a different Retinal camera system than what is office) that using optos Retinal photo with OCT increased diagnoses of macular diseases by 29.4% which is crazy think about. The OCT we got was an OCTA, which it can see how blood flows through the blood vessels and to see if new blood vessels are forming earlier (called Neovascularization), which is great because we have great treatment for neovascularization, and the earlier the treatment, the better the outcome. Which neovascularization is one of the reasons why people can go blind with macular degeneration, diabetes, and a lot of other diseases. Dr. Chappel promises this is one of the many instruments as we continue to redefine your idea of eye exam .