By Ryan DuBosar
“The eyes have it” at Internal Medicine Meeting 2026, with a session addressing ocular diseases for internal medicine physicians led by ophthalmologist Chris R. Alabiad, MD, Thursday at 4:30 p.m. PT.
Dr. Alabiad’s session will address ocular manifestations associated with common systemic diseases, discuss leading causes of vision loss in older adults, review can’t miss ophthalmic diagnoses for primary care physicians, and demonstrate how the combination of artificial intelligence and advanced retinal imaging can offer predictive capabilities for cardiac, renal, and neurologic disease processes.
“We're going to familiarize the audience with the eye, share some simplified anatomy of the eye and the orbit, and then give some insights as to how the eye is a window to systemic disease,” said Dr. Alabiad, who serves as the associate dean for student affairs at the University of Miami and is the director of the ophthalmology residency and fellowship programs at Bascom Palmer Eye Institute of the University of Miami. “Also, we'll review common ocular conditions that an internist should be able to recognize quickly as they take care of their patients, and triage what is urgent and what is not urgent.”
Sudden vision loss is an example of a problem that may come up often in the inpatient and outpatient setting. “There are a few entities that are urgent,” said Dr. Alabiad. Sudden unilateral vision loss, for example, suggests anything from a cerebrovascular event, inflammatory conditions, such as temporal arteritis, or even a retinal detachment, each requiring urgent intervention."
Internal medicine physicians might have patients present with loss of visual fields, “and they could do some quick confrontational visual fields in the clinic [to assess this]. If the patient is missing a right hemifield in both eyes, then that would also be very much suggestive of an active stroke that's happening that requires urgent intervention,” Dr. Alabiad said.
Dr. Alabiad will end the session sharing how technological advances in imaging and artificial intelligence may allow for using the eye to predict and/or follow cardiovascular disease, renal disease, and neurodegenerative disease. ■