CONTACT LENS FITTING

The 41st annual meeting of the European Contact Lens Society of Ophthalmologists (ECLSO) in Istanbul played host to a live contact lens fitting practice, which provided practical demonstrations of the assessment of unusual and difficult cases and was the first of its kind to take place at an international meeting, according to the organisers. The idea behind the live fitting session was to have something similar to a live surgery session, but which would be devoted to contact lens fitting rather than surgery, said Tomris Şengör MD, president of the Turkish Contact Lens Society, who moderated the session with Dr Emrullah Taşındı. 'Live surgery sessions are a very popular part of ophthalmology congresses. However, as contact lens practitioners, we do not have surgery, but fitting. Consequently, I decided to put this idea into practice as ‘Live Fitting' a sort of live surgery,' Dr Şengör, Istanbul Bilim University Ophthalmology Department, told EuroTimes. The topic of the session was 'How to fit contact lenses in difficult cases'. The session's organisers selected 10 challenging cases. They presented patients who had previous difficulties obtaining a good quality of vision with spectacles and contact lenses because of irregular corneas resulting from refractive surgery, keratoplasty, advanced keratoconus, intracorneal rings and trauma.

[caption id='attachment_2290' align='alignleft' width='300' caption='Pictures from the live contact lens fitting session at the 41st annual meeting of the ECLSO'][/caption]

During the live fitting session, the lecturers, Dr Tomris Şengör, Dr Canan Gürdal, Dr Ömür Uçakhan Gündüz, and Dr Banu Coşar, presented the biomicroscopic images and the data of the patients before contact lens fitting and described the difficulty involved in each case. Meanwhile, Dr Sevda Aydın Kurna and Dr Yelda Buyru Özkurt, who were with the patients in the examination room, explained their views of the best available solution to the problems each case presented, and fitted the contact lenses accordingly. The patients could also answer the questions from the session's participants regarding their experience of the fitting process and their degree of satisfaction with the outcome. Throughout the session, a video link connected the auditorium with the examination room, where one video camera was connected to the biomicroscope and another enabled the audience to view the patient and the examiner. Dr Hilmi Or and Dr Ahmet Altun were responsible for the technical details of the communication. In this way, the attendees of the session saw the biomicroscopic view of the patients' eyes with or without the contact lenses and they were also able to see the patients as they answered their questions. 'The session went very smoothly, almost absolutely perfectly, and it was almost like live surgery, both for the people who applied the lenses and for the people in the audience,' Dr Şengör said. She noted that the Contact Lens Division of the Turkish Ophthalmology Society had previously organised a similar live fitting programme at the first Practical Contact Lens Day held in Istanbul in 2010. 'There are plans for similar sessions at other international congresses in the future', she said. 'We would like to encourage all of our colleagues who are interested in contact lenses to organise such interactive practices in future that make the meetings more colourful and beneficial,' she added.