Barbara Blodi

I am the medical director of the Wisconsin Reading Center (WRC), a core imaging lab assisting investigators and pharmaceutical companies in the evaluation of retinal images in patients with diabetic retinopathy and diabetic macular edema. In the area of diabetic retinopathy, I am the reading center principal investigator for the Diabetic Retinopathy Clinical Research Network (DRCR) studies. I am currently the PI for the EDIC trial and was the PI for the DPPOS and TODAY2 trials that focus on the development and progression of diabetic retinopathy. I developed and published the protocols for evaluating retinal vein occlusions using fundus photographs, fluorescein angiography and optical coherence tomograms as developed in the original SCORE study (2003-2009). My current work includes a development of a new grading method for ultrawidefield color photography and fluorescein angiography, which allows photographers to simultaneously image over 200 degrees of the retina and allows graders evaluate leakage and non-perfusion of the angiographic images. In addition, we are using a new optical coherence tomography software that involves separating or “segmenting” individual layers of the retina. This technique allows us to correlate visual loss to changes in individual layers of the neurosensory retina and retinal pigment epithelium.