Hello, I'm Stela Vujosevic. I'm the associate professor of ophthalmology at University of Milan in Italy and retina specialist and head of medical retina unit at the St. Joseph Hospital in Milan. So my presentation was on the metabolic evaluation of the retina in AMD and diabetic retinopathy. Why the metabolic evaluation of the retina is important? Because the retina is a highly active metabolic ecosystems where we know that the photoreceptors are highly active cells and also Mueller cells are very important in providing the support to the neurovascular unit. So the integrity of the neurovascular unit and the health of the neurovascular unit is crucial for the functional integrity also of the retina. So my talk was on a particular specific evaluation of metabolic activity of the retina by non-invasive imaging modalities like fundus autofluorescence. So what we saw in a recent study in intermediate AMD and in very initial stages of the geographic atrophy that when you evaluate specific lesions in these conditions on OCT, you can distinguish better those that have, let's say, lower metabolic activity and then that are let's say closer to the progression to geographic atrophy.

For example, IRORA lesions and nascent GI lesions had completely different spectrally resolved fundus autofluorescent sinus. So it seems that GA lesions are more similar metabolically to CRORA rather than IRORA, which we know are the lesions in the intermedium stage of the disease. On another note, in diabetic retinopathy, the evaluation of the spectrally resolved fundus autofluorescence in the early stages of the disease may be related also to the microvascular damage of the macula that can be evaluated by OCTA and especially decreased perfusion metrics in the deep capillary plexus. We found that there were specific changes in this spectrally resolved fundus autofluorescence. So to conclude spectrally resolved fundus autofluorescence may represent a complement imaging modality to evaluate let's say the health or the metabolic activity of the retina in different conditions. It definitely merits to be further evaluated, especially in the prospective studies in all of these different conditions.