The League of Extraordinary Ophthalmologists
The Ophthalmic Premier League educates, excites and amazes. Here’s what we learned in Las Vegas!
Complicated case presentations are worth attending. They’re supremely informative, and the knowledge gained can make an impact at any point during a surgeon’s career. But they can be a little dry. That’s why I took a different approach:
- Sixteen of the world’s best eye surgeons
- Four-minute video presentations
- Trash-talking – and costumes, and crucially...
- A total PowerPoint ban.
This is the Ophthalmic Premier League (OPL). Something that’s as educational as the driest of presentations, but with as much fun as anything that would happen in the bars at the end of a long day. Where else can you see Boris Malyugin dancing in a pirate costume? Abhay Vasavada firing a ping pong gun at delegates? Richard Lindstrom in a wig? OPL.
Origins
Here in India, we have the Indian Premier League professional Twenty20 (T20) cricket league. For those who aren’t aware, first-class cricket (i.e. the big international and domestic matches) feature some of the best players in the world, and you’ll often see some of the best cricketing ever. But these matches consist of four innings, can take three or more days to complete, and it certainly isn’t all constant action. Instead of lasting three days, T20 matches last three hours. The cricketing is some of the best you’ll see – it’s considered to be a more “explosive” and athletic form of the sport, and everything is considerably less formal – players have been known to wear costume elements, moustaches, and poke fun at their opponents, thereby entertaining the crowd. It’s a serious competition, but also fun.
Now, I always hold the annual conference of the Indian Intraocular Implant & Refractive Society (IIIRS) in Chennai in July. One day I thought, why don’t we hold an Ophthalmic Premier League during it? I thought about the format, and decided on four teams with four players each. You have 16 of the top surgeons in the world, showcasing their craziest cases, how they handled them, each with four minutes to present their story – it’s a great learning opportunity. I ask each team to “attack” the other teams – with banter, a bit of “trash talking”. It’s great fun, and we involve the audience too – they get to vote for their favorite teams and presenters with keypads at the end. It’s a real competition.
In addition to running it at the IIIRS meeting, we’ve held it once during ESCRS, once at the World Ophthalmology Congress, and each time was a great success. The alternative, yet hugely entertaining event has now been held twice at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Ophthalmology (AAO), and we’ll be running it again in Chicago this October.
Here are some of the highlights from last year’s OPL@AAO – depicted in a unique format that captures the spirit of the event.
Amar Agarwal is a pioneer of microincisional cataract surgery. He was first to remove cataracts through a 0.7 mm tip; first to develop no-anesthesia cataract surgery; first to implant a glued IOL; first to implant a mirror telescopic IOL in AMD, and first to use Trypan blue as an epiretinal membrane stain. He coined the term “aberropia” to describe uncompensated HOA profiles following refractive surgery, and produced a modified Malyugin ring for miotic pupil cataract surgeries with posterior capsular defects. Most recently, he and Harminder Dua (qv) pioneered Pre-Descemet’s Endothelial Keratoplasty, which allows for the use of younger corneal donors than previous techniques, greatly increasing the donor tissue pool. He’s also chairman of Dr. Agarwal’s Eye Hospital group – a major chain of eye hospitals, headquartered in Chennai, with more than 40 other branches across India, and a further 12 overseas.
