Key Facts About The Vision Center

Home to the largest pediatric ophthalmology program in the United States, The Vision Center is a Center of Excellence at Childrens Hospital Los Angeles.

The Vision Center is an international referral center for children afflicted with all forms of eye disease and provides a full range of specialty inpatient and outpatient care.

Each year, there are more than 13,000 outpatient visits and more than 900 ophthalmic surgeries to The Vision Center.

The Vision Center is the only program in the United States with expertise and treatment programs in virtually every pediatric ophthalmologic subspecialty.

The Vision Center is comprised of six institutes – Retina, Cornea, Eye Birth Defects, Vision Development, Orbit and Eye Movement and Eye Technology.

The Vision Center is affiliated with the Doheny Eye Institute and Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California (USC).

The Vision Center, in conjunction with the Keck School of Medicine, participates in clinical trials and research to revolutionize diagnosis and treatment procedures in pediatric eye care.

Pediatric eye care research and education at The Vision Center has led to landmark discoveries from correcting eye alignment to treating eye cancer, from preventing common eye diseases to giving every infant the best quality of life.

Pioneering Research and Surgical Procedures

The Vision Center is the only facility in the world to use an innovative technique to combine the use of a tiny endoscope coupled with a portable, bedside spectral domain optical coherence tomograph (SDOCT) for the early detection and treatment of retinal detachment from retinopathy of prematurely (ROP).

Childrens Hospital Los Angeles was the first hospital in the United States to implant an artificial cornea in a pediatric patient.

The Vision Center annually performs the largest number of pediatric cornea and cataract surgeries in the United States, including 25-30 corneal transplants. It is also one of the few programs in the world to perform corneal transplants in infants.

It is one of only a few facilities in the United States to provide treatment of refractive errors with LASIK (laser-assisted) surgery for children who cannot utilize contact lenses.

The Vision Center is the leading research center in the epidemiology and management of Optic Nerve Hyperplasia (ONH) and other devastating birth defects and is directing the largest-ever clinical research study in the treatment of ONH.

The Vision Development Institute is leading an investigation on strabismus, or eye misalignment, using the latest in neuron-imaging technology – functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (firm) – to pinpoint where visual activities occur in the brains of children, adolescents and adults who have signs of visual suppression. This research may ultimately lead to new therapies for those whose eyes and brains aren’t in sync.

Advances in measuring vision in pre-verbal toddlers and infants, including the recent development of a computerized version of the Forced-Choice Preferential Looking Test, have been developed at The Vision Center.

Researchers at Childrens Hospital Los Angeles pioneered the invention of the RetCam more than 20 years ago. The device is now used worldwide for visualizing the back of the eye in infants and children.

The Eye Technology Institute has pioneered the use of spectroscopy to measure glucose levels in the eye, which could replace needle tests to determine blood sugar levels in diabetics. It has also developed technologies to measure chemotherapy and other toxin levels in the brain via the eye.

In 1987, researchers at Childrens Hospital Los Angeles identified the gene that causes retinoblastoma (Rb), an eye cancer that most often occurs in children under five years of age.

The Retinoblastoma Program, part of The Vision Center’s Retina Institute, is responsible for developing state-of-the-art strategies for treating Rb. The Retinoblastoma Program is the only program of its kind in the world based in a children’s hospital.

The Retinoblastoma Program pioneered the concept of chemoreduction, a common procedure treating Rb by reducing the volume of intraocular retinoblastoma with systemic chemotherapy followed by eradication with focal laser or freezing heat.