St. Luke’s leads fight against childhood blindness with PH’s first RetCam3

CHAMPIONING pediatric care in the country, St. Luke’s Medical Center- Quezon City recently acquired the RetCam3, one of the most advanced diagnostic eye technologies that can help prevent childhood blindness at an earlier stage.

The RetCam3 is a fully- integrated, wide- field digital imaging system capable of capturing ophthalmic images for premature infants and children, and can now be found at the hospital’s International Eye Institute.

This newest machine is ideal for the diagnosis and documentation of Retinopathy of Prematurity ( ROP), a disease of the eye affecting prematurely- born and underweight babies who have received intensive neonatal care. ROP is also the leading single cause of childhood blindness whose detection method and treatment pose challenges among the world’s ophthalmic specialists.

ROP has to be diagnosed in a timely manner so that appropriate treatment can be initiated earlier, improving the chance to save eyesight. As there are not enough ROP specialists even in industrialized countries, telemedicine which the system fully supports, plays a vital role in the disease analysis and treatment recommendation for patients.

St. Luke’s RetCam3 diagnostic ophthalmic technology offers real time video recording, enabling pediatric eye specialists to select the best still images from a video capture or to capture quality images for reading and analysis purposes.

St. Luke’s– Quezon City ROP Service head Dr. Jose MB Jimenez IV said that the new technology will “not only allow more accurate judgments of the eye condition of the babies but more so bring about better documentation and progress monitoring of ROP cases to save or recover eyesight.”

St. Luke’s ROP Service is under its International Eye Institute which is headed by Dr. Ruben Lim Bon Siong and the Section of Retina and Vitreous headed by Dr. Pearl TamesisVillalon. For more information, call tel. no. ( 632) 723-0101/0301 ext. 5422.