Mexico City’s Top Retinal Surgeon Praises Advanced AR Wear Technology for Patients with Low Vision Conditions
MYKONOS (July 9, 2019)
Ocutrx Vision Technologies, Inc., a California-based technology startup developing a state-of-the-art augmented reality headset, was the highlight of the recently completed Aegean Retina Conference in Mykonos, Greece. The conference included scientific sessions featuring papers, special lectures, and unusual clinical retina cases. Dr. Hugo Quiroz-Mercado (retinal surgeon at the Hospital para Evitar la Ceguera en México, professor at the University of Colorado, member of the Ocutrx International Medical Advisory Board and the company’s chief liaison to Latin America) presented a lecture titled “Augmented Reality restoring vision for Age-Related Macular Degeneration.”
Dr. Quiroz-Mercado – who works in a nonprofit hospital in Mexico City that serves up to 1,800 patients every day – is frustrated by the limited technology on the market to help those who suffer from end-stage Age-Related Macular Degeneration, a disease that will drastically affect the vision of over 200 million people worldwide by 2020.
“We give shots to help delay the progression of AMD, but, as a physician and a surgeon, my goal is to have better patient outcomes,” says Dr. Quiroz-Mercado. “So far technology for AMD has failed the medical community.”
However, this week he was able to present a new option with the introduction of advanced AR wear technology. Ocutrx Vision Technologies, founded by the inventors of mobile video, is changing the forecast of Age-Related Macular Degeneration (AMD). According to Dr. Quiroz-Mercado, the Oculenz AR wearable is the only solution for correcting AMD on the market.
Helping improve the quality of life for patients is how Ocutrx and their Oculenz headset was inspired and conceived. When Brig. Gen. Richard C. Freeman, a retired fighter pilot and co-inventor of mobile video, developed AMD, he assembled his sons Michael and Mitch Freeman together and challenged them with the riddle of a lifetime: to fix his vision.
“We started with computer programming in real time with my father’s vision to identify the edges of his scotoma, which is the area that is damaged and has no vision,” CEO and CTO Michael Freeman says. Once they knew where their father could still see and where he had lost his sight, they developed an algorithm that modified the image to push the streaming video to avoid the area of the defect. “The whole image was there, but none of it was in the area of the blind spot,” Freeman adds.
This technology has reinvigorated Dr. Quiroz-Mercado and other leading surgeons in his field enough that they are using their time on the professional stage to tell other ophthalmologist and surgeons that Oculenz is the solution for their end-stage AMD patients who are currently left in the dark. For example, Dr. Linda Lam, M.D., M.B.A gave a presentation about Ocutrx’s wildly successful patient study in Lisbon, Portugal on the same day. So far, the Ocutrx Clinical Trial results have been presented in the US and five other countries.
Following Dr. Quiroz-Mercado’s presentation, he and Ocutrx’s chief of communication, Victoria McArtor, were flooded with questions from an international collection of interested surgeons and professors, including Dr. Dean Cestari from Massachusetts Eye and Ear, a teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School, who said, “This technology is far ahead of other competitors in the field. The potential here is incredible.”
About Ocutrx
With corporate headquarters in Irvine, California, and a research and development lab in the US Midwest, Ocutrx is a new breed of AR manufacturing company focusing on the best connected lightest weight AR headset housing the largest field-of-vision in the market. At a time when worldwide applications for easy-to-wear and easy-to-use AR solutions are being touted as the “next big thing after smartphones,” Ocutrx is creating impactful, revolutionary AR wear for mass use.