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Reading Centers

The Lowy Medical Research Institute contracts and collaborates with two extramural Reading Centers, which provide objective analyses of ophthalmic images. LMRI works with the Moorfields Reading Center in London, run in partnership with the University College London, and with the Duke Reading Center in North Carolina.

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Reading Centers are staffed with experts who analyze ophthalmic images, such as OCT images or fluorescein angiographies. Readers are trained to examine images from a wide range of eye diseases, and to diagnose and classify eye diseases based on the images. Readers also provide measurements or scores of disease progression.

In addition to their expertise in evaluating ophthalmic images, both of the Reading Centers work in close partnerships with external groups, like LMRI, to support multi-site clinical trials. They train readers to reproducibly evaluate images, resulting in more accurate disease descriptions and diagnoses. This leads to more successful clinical trials outcomes.

For LMRI, the Reading Centers provide unbiased evaluations of retinal images from people who have been referred to The MacTel Project, or people who have been referred to participate in clinical trials. The Moorfields Reading Center confirms the diagnosis of The MacTel Project’s Registry participants. The Registry includes people who have MacTel, as well as their unaffected family members. The Duke Reading Center objectively determines if individuals with MacTel are eligible to participate in clinical trials. The Duke Reading Center also objectively measures disease progression in clinical trial participants.


Moorfields Reading Center

The Moorfields Reading Centre evaluates all ophthalmic images collected as part of the MacTel Project Registry and the Natural History Observation Study, and offers the official diagnosis of MacTel for patients who participate in these research projects.

The Moorfields Reading Centre for ophthalmic images was established by the Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, in partnership with the University College London Institute of Ophthalmology.  The Moorfields Reading Centre was established because there was a recognized need for a center that could create robust ophthalmic surveys and clinical trial project designs.  Clinical trials were hampered by an inability to develop robust outcome measures, in part because ophthalmic diseases had not been thoroughly characterized.  The Reading Centre serves as an unbiased, independent center for image analysis.

The Reading Centre standardizes the definition of diseased states, relating to the retina.  They also standardize what is classified as an abnormality in ophthalmic images.  They collect measurements from images, and grade images, so that changes can be recognized.

The classification of disease status has been extremely important to the MacTel Project.  One aspect of the MacTel Project is to analyze families with macular telangiectasia type 2.  Following the identification of one individual in a family with MacTel (the “proband”), their relatives may be examined for MacTel.  The Moorfields Reading Centre determines if family members are affected or unaffected.   This can be difficult for an age-related disease, where it is possible that an individual is not yet showing all of the symptoms of disease that would lead to a definitive diagnosis.

Duke Reading Center

The Duke Reading Center, located in North Carolina, is primarily a contract research center comprised of a group of ocular imaging, clinical trial, and biostatistics specialists.  The Duke Reading Center advises sponsors of ophthalmic clinical trials on the design and execution of their studies, reads ophthalmic images for clinical studies, and performs statistical analyses of image data.  They also certify and train study-site personnel in the capture and submission of ophthalmic images to the Reading Center according to study protocols.

The Duke Reading Center is the designated reading center for the NT-501 clinical trial.