Community-based amblyopia screening using a novel device

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PROJECT SUMMARY Worldwide, more than 500,000 children become blind each year, and the majority of blind children live in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), where rates of preventable vision loss and blindness are significantly higher. Amblyopia is the leading cause of vision loss in children worldwide. Vision loss from amblyopia can be prevented through early, effective amblyopia screening, though current screening devices have high sensitivity and low specificity which leads to a high number of false positive referrals. This ultimately limits the success of amblyopia screening programs due to increased cost and resource utilization, which is of particular concern in LMICs and low resource settings. This proposal will evaluate the efficacy and cost-effectiveness of two amblyopia screening devices and screening strategies: a current standard device, autorefractor (AR), which only detects amblyopia risk factors, and a novel device, retinal birefringence scanner (RBS), which detects amblyopia directly. Aim 1 of this proposal will compare the performance of the AR and RBS devices for detecting amblyopia in a clinic-based setting in Nepal. Aim 2 will compare the devices in a community-based setting in Nepal. Aim 3 will compare the cost-effectiveness of these two amblyopia screening strategies and devices. The feasibility of these Aims is anchored by collaboration with the Village Integrated Eye Worker II (VIEW II) trial, a cluster-randomized trial led by the candidate’s primary mentor, Dr. Jeremy Keenan. The VIEW II trial randomizes adults in peri-urban communities in Nepal to undergo a vision screening intervention by trained community outreach workers. This proposal incorporates several innovations. First, it uniquely leverages a well-established adult vision screening infrastructure to create and evaluate a screening program for children. Second, it will be the first study to directly compare the performance and cost of two amblyopia screening strategies. The candidate, Dr. Julius Oatts is a pediatric ophthalmologist at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), whose long-term goal is to become an independent investigator with expertise in diagnostic accuracy studies for novel technologies to diagnose and monitor preventable vision loss in children nationally and internationally. To successfully complete this research, Dr. Oatts will focus on four relevant domains of training: diagnostic accuracy studies, clinical trial design, cost-effectiveness analysis, and epidemiology and biostatistics. His exceptional mentorship team includes his primary mentor, Dr. Jeremy Keenan, Director of International Programs at the Proctor Foundation and PI of the VIEW II trial, and co- mentors Dr. David Hunter, Chief of Ophthalmology at Boston Children’s Hospital, and Dr. Ying Han, Director of the UCSF Glaucoma service. This team, combined with the environment of the Proctor Foundation and UCSF Department of Ophthalmology, will support his development into an NIH-funded independent investigator.