Dr Geoffrey Ryan recently became the first surgeon in Australia to implant the eyePlate-S glaucoma tube drainage device. The new device is the latest in a series of minimally invasive surgeries offering more treatment options to glaucoma patients.
Dr Ryan is an expert in advanced anterior segment surgery and has subspecialty training in glaucoma and cornea. He seized the opportunity to introduce this new device in Australia.
” As a surgeon already familiar with glaucoma tube surgery, the most striking feature of this new device was how technically straightforward the procedure felt compared to other tube shunt platforms,” Dr Ryan says. “The learning curve appears genuinely low, which I believe will make this device accessible to a broader range of glaucoma surgeons.”
Glaucoma is a condition where the optic nerve is affected by increased fluid build-up in the front of the eye. It remains the leading cause of irreversible blindness in adults worldwide.
The main goal of glaucoma treatment is to lower intraocular pressure to prevent optic nerve damage and vision loss. Treatment has progressed from iridectomy in the 1850s, where part of the iris was removed to improve fluid drainage, to today’s medications, eye drops and sophisticated laser and surgical techniques.
