Catherine Sun
University of California-San Francisco, CA·Medicine & Clinical Research·Early-career
Diabetes can damage the blood vessels of the retina, the light-sensing tissue at the back of the eye. This diabetic retinopathy is the leading cause of preventable blindness among working-age adults in the United States.
- Fields
Medicine & Clinical Research
Public Health & Epidemiology
Computer Science
- Topics
ophthalmology
diabetic retinopathy
diabetes
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through May 2027
What they work on
- Develop an automated method to identify patients with proliferative diabetic retinopathy in electronic health records, combining structured data such as diagnosis codes, medications and labs with unstructured clinical notes.
- Predict progression from non-proliferative diabetic retinopathy to the proliferative form using a forecasting model with time-varying covariates in the UCSF De-Identified Clinical Data Warehouse.
- Determine the real-world effectiveness of treatments for proliferative diabetic retinopathy using the nationwide IRIS registry of eye care data.
More about the research
Its advanced form, proliferative diabetic retinopathy (PDR), can cause permanent vision loss. Timely diagnosis and treatment often prevent that loss, but some high-risk patients do not get adequate eye care. Little is known about how PDR treatments perform in everyday practice compared with clinical trials.
Why it matters
People with diabetes are at risk of preventable blindness from proliferative diabetic retinopathy. Automated ways to find these patients in health records, predict who will progress, and compare how treatments work in practice could help clinicians catch disease earlier and choose effective care. The methods could also support future EHR-based studies of other eye diseases.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Yali Jia
Oregon Health & Science University, OR·Biomedical Engineering
Build a 1-MHz, 120° wide-field, high-resolution OCTA system with GPU real-time processing that captures reliable retinal blood-flow images in a single scan, without stitching images together.
Allison Summers
Oregon Health & Science University, OR·Medicine & Clinical Research
Develop large language model pipelines that extract amblyopia treatment, adherence and visual outcome information from free-text ophthalmology clinical notes, where these concepts are documented inconsistently and not in structured EHR fields.
Jeffrey Jarvik
University of Washington, WA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Improve study design methods for musculoskeletal observational studies and clinical trials, to strengthen confirmatory research on which treatments work.
The school
University of California-San Francisco: 89 labs on PI Pages, $2.1B a year on research, 164 research doctorates a year.
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