Roomasa Channa

I am a retina specialist focusing on studying vision loss from diabetic retinal diseases (DRD). I am specifically interested in elucidating the role of retinal neurodegeneration in vision loss associated with diabetes and to identify patients with diabetes who are at risk of development of neurodegenerative changes. My research focuses on two main problems which continue to make DRDs the leading cause of vision loss among working-aged adults: 1) poor compliance with screening eye exams and recommended treatments; 2) patients who continue to have poor vision despite receiving standard of care treatments. We address these problems by: 1) Studying implementation of point-of-care artificial intelligence (AI) based techniques to improve access to screening for diabetic retinopathy; and 2) 2) Identifying novel pathways of vision loss in diabetes, by leveraging advances in retinal imaging, AI-based tools and genetic data.