Monitoring eye cancer 

Moles at the back of the eye are common and though the vast majority are not harmful, some are difficult to distinguish from small melanomas. This means frequent and long term monitoring is usually required.

The last decade has seen advances in multimodal ocular imaging. Wide-angle colour photography and other kinds of imaging of tumours at the back of the eye, such as fundus autofluorescence imaging and optical coherence tomography, can reveal abnormalities invisible on a conventional eye examination. 

The Covid-19 pandemic has encouraged monitoring to be performed remotely to reduce risk of infection, minimize unnecessary patient travel and maximise NHS resources.

Unlike benign moles, malignant melanomas tend to enlarge over time. Such growth can be measured by ultrasonography. However, this requires skills and equipment not widely available in the community.

Mr. Bertil Damato, consultant ophthalmologist at Moorfields and senior clinical research fellow at the University of Oxford and colleagues reviewed images of 99 patients treated for choroidal melanoma after a period of observation. They found that monitoring for growth can be accomplished safely without the need for ultrasonography by assessing colour photographs alone.

Mr. Damato has devised an acroynm, MOLES to help non-experts remember the most important signs of malignancy which are:

He has also developed a scoring system to estimate the likelihood of malignancy in melanocytic choroidal tumours. Dr. Lamis Al Harby, Professor Mandeep Sagoo and Mr. Damato studied a cohort of 222 patients at Moorfields to test the MOLES system. 

The MOLES system proved highly successful, with the same diagnosis being returned in more than 97% of cases compared with expert diagnosis. This study has received press coverage and will soon be available to read in the journal, Ocular Oncology and Pathology.

Further research is needed to evaluate how successfully the MOLES system is used by non-specialist ophthalmologists and community optometrists in a variety of working environments. 

This research promises to improve patient care around the world. It aims to help avoid unnecessary hospital visits while speeding up diagnosis and treatment of those with malignant melanoma. 

These successful results also pave the way for enhancing diagnosis of ocular tumours by artificial intelligence. This is already under way at Moorfields and other centres.

Following the success and learnings from these recent findings the team decided to look at the use of ultrasonography on treated choroidal melanoma.

In doing this, they wanted to apply the same effective methods to test the hypothesis that ultrasonography is not always required for monitoring treated malignant melanomas.

If this was the case, the majority of patients could therefore be monitored in their local clinics rather than having to travel longer distances to specialised centres.

While there will always be a group of patients who will need to be monitored at an ocular oncology centre, the findings from this research have the potential to be practice-transforming, saving patient time, expense and stress of additional specialist centre visits without compromising safety.

The open access of these journal publications are supported by Moorfields Eye Charity Research Enhancement Awards. Open access enables researchers and the public alike to read scientific publications without delay or charge.