Rapid diagnosis and treatment initiation are crucial for treating retinal artery occlusions (RAOs). To improve them at the point of care, ophthalmologists have developed a remote consult RAO diagnostic protocol and tested it on 59 patients with RAO and painless monocular vision loss. The protocol was implemented in the emergency or stroke centers of three hospitals where neurologists evaluated patients and acquired optical coherence tomography images.
The images were interpreted remotely by the retina specialists. In the study, 42% of patients were confirmed to have RAO and nine patients received intra-arterial tissue plasminogen activator treatment within 146 minutes from the time of presentation. Visual acuity was significantly improved in patients within 24 hours (logarithm of the minimum angle of resolution [logMAR] from 2.14 to 0.7) and after four weeks (logMAR – 1.04) of…
