Pterygium

This is a multi-center, cross-sectional study evaluating a smartphone-based artificial intelligence (AI) system for anterior segment eye disease screening. The system is designed to identify 16 clinically important anterior segment conditions from images captured using a standard Android smartphone. A core design feature of the system is that all image analysis is performed entirely on the smartphone itself, without requiring internet connectivity or cloud-based server infrastructure. The study is motivated by a structural challenge in the deployment of medical AI: systems that depend on cloud infrastructure for inference are non-functional in settings without reliable internet access, which disproportionately excludes populations in low-resource regions where the burden of preventable eye disease is highest. This study evaluates whether an on-device AI system, designed with operational constraints as a primary engineering objective, can deliver clinically acceptable diagnostic performance while remaining operable under real-world connectivity limitations. The study comprises five evaluation components. First, the diagnostic performance of the AI system is benchmarked against board-certified ophthalmologists of varying seniority on a standardized set of smartphone-captured anterior segment images. Second, the usability of the system is evaluated among non-medical users who perform self-administered screening with minimal instruction, with per-screening time recorded across consecutive attempts to characterize the learning curve. Third, a head-to-head field trial directly compares the on-device AI system against a functionally equivalent cloud-based deployment of the same model architecture across key operational dimensions including screening duration, diagnostic performance, and user acceptability. Fourth, population-level screening is conducted among consecutively enrolled community residents at two low-resource sites, with per-disease sensitivity and specificity calculated against reference-standard slit-lamp examinations. Fifth, pre-specified health-economic and environmental analyses compare the two deployment modalities in terms of per-person screening cost, cost-effectiveness, per-inference electricity consumption, and projected carbon emissions at scale. The reference standard for all diagnostic comparisons is slit-lamp biomicroscopic examination performed by board-certified ophthalmologists. The study is designed and reported in accordance with the DECIDE-AI reporting guideline for early-stage clinical evaluation of AI-driven decision-support systems.

This study will evaluate the effectiveness of hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT) on treating emerging indications (i.e., conditions that have shown to potentially benefit from HBOT) using the Multicenter Registry for Hyperbaric Oxygen Treatment. The study team aims to collect ongoing data on how well HBOT treats these emerging indications, and to add these data to the growing HBO Registry. The research team hypothesizes that HBOT will result in improvements of the condition of the various emerging indications.

This study compares two surgical techniques for preventing the regrowth of a pterygium, a non-cancerous growth on the eye. After surgically removing the pterygium, surgeons will cover the area with either a flap of nearby tissue that is rotated into place (Rotational Flap) or with a free graft of tissue taken from under the upper eyelid (Autograft). The main goal is to see which method is better at preventing the pterygium from growing back over a 6-month period. A total of 342 patients with a primary pterygium will be randomly assigned to one of the two surgical groups.

The goal of this study is to find out if a certain technique in pterygium excision surgery ,using no sutures, is better than the technique mostly used ,which uses sutures. Investigators aim to find out whether the no sutures technique provides better efficiency and patient satisfaction than the traditional approach. They predict that if this study provides evidence of the advantages of this technique over the one used, surgeons would be encouraged to use it instead. Because not only would the patient benefit, the surgeon also may save operative time and effort used in the technique which uses sutures.