AUSCRS 2025 has started with an ending.
On Wednesday night – and in typical AUSCRS fashion – Professor Gerard Sutton and Dr Jacqueline Beltz entered the venue in Darwin dressed as intrepid Aussie tour guides, driving a 4WD.
The next morning, the co-presidents of the Australian Society of Cataract and Refractive Surgeons (AUSCRS) officially and more formally welcomed those attending the organisation’s annual conference, which attracts some of the leading ophthalmologists from around the country and the world.
Dr Beltz told those attending this would be Prof Sutton’s third and last AUSCRS in his current capacity.
Three years ago, the pair took over the co-presidency roles from Professor Graham Barrett and Dr Rick Wolfe who founded AUSCRS in the mid-1990s.
Dr Beltz will be the society’s president, with Dr Andrea Ang, a consultant ophthalmologist at Lions Eye Institute, named as vice-president.
“It’s been an absolute ride,” Dr Beltz told the audience of her tenure with Prof Sutton.
“We’ve shared so many memorable moments up here on stage, but it’s behind the scenes, plotting, planning, laughing that I treasure the most.
“We’re going to say thank you a few times throughout this meeting, but I want to take every chance I can to say it again now. So Gerard, it’s been a blast. Thank you very much.”
That ending delivered, the official part of the event began, with Professor Michael Knorz giving the coveted Barrett/Wolfe Lecture.
Prof Knorz, medical director of the FreeVis LASIK Center Mannheim and internationally recognised as one of the leading experts in the field of refractive and cataract surgery, talked about presbyopia-correcting intraocular lenses (IOLs) – their past, present and future.
He offered a number of anecdotes from his own work and of particular interest was his evaluations of extended depth of focus (EDOF) IOLs alongside multifocals.
In Prof Knorz’s vision of the future, EDOFs would replace monofocal IOLs as the standard of care, but the next step in IOL evolution was the development of accommodating IOLs.
His talk prompted a number of questions, as did the rest of the day’s sessions, which included a Game of Thrones-themed look at challenging case studies and a homage to Back to the Future that looked at cataract surgical outcomes.
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