New optics textbook aims to be a compendium resource for the topic

Video transcript

Note: This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Hello, everyone. My name is Kamran Riaz and I am an associate professor at the Dean McGee Eye Institute at the University of Oklahoma specializing in cataract and corneal refractive surgery.

Today, I'd like to talk to you all about our recently published book titled, "Optics for the New Millennium," which I was very fortunate to be one of the chief editors for.

This is a book that we worked on for more than two and a half years. And this book will hopefully serve as a one-stop shop compendium resource for trainees, residents, fellows who want to learn about written optics, clinical optics for exams, oral board exams, written board exams, as well as surgical and clinical practice. So the book is intentionally large; it has more than 450 pages with 375 different images along with about 200 review questions. And it's titled "Optics for the New Millennium," but really is optics for millennials. We intentionally wrote it in a way that today's trainee would appreciate the clinical and surgical relevance of what has historically and notoriously been a very challenging material for students, but also presented with some humor with some brevity with some mnemonics and sort of a consistent theme about why we should care about optics because it does really permeate everything we do as ophthalmologists.

The 30 chapters are divided into three different parts. Part 1 deals with written exams. So there's 14 chapters dealing with all the optics you'll need for OKAPs [Ophthalmic Knowledge Assessment Program] and WQE [Written Qualifying Exam] and that sort of thing. So some of the boring stuff, but we try to make it somewhat entertaining. For example, the telescope and magnification chapter is written in the voice of a pirate. So you're imagining that you're a pirate trying to construct a telescope and what are the optics, you'll need to know for that.

The second part is 11 chapters on clinical optics that one will need for oral board exams as well as the clinical practice of ophthalmology, including a chapter about optics in space and zero gravity conditions. So those of you who are planning to maybe go on the Mars mission, you may want to read up on that.

And finally, the third part of the book is something that we're very proud of, which is really all the optics that someone will need for cataract and refractive surgery. The chapter that we're probably most excited about is a whole chapter called, "What's on the Menu?" which has an overview of all of the currently available lens implants that are available in the United States ranging from standard lenses to astigmatism-correcting lenses, as well as all of the presbyopia-correcting lenses that are available, sort of as a one-stop compendium place where people can can have that.

So we're very excited about this book, we hope it's something that residents will use early in their careers and will continue to keep somewhere on their desks as a reference resource for clinical and surgical practice. We're very, like I said, I'm very indebted to my co-editors, Vike Vicente and Danny Wee, as well as the authors that participated in this, and especially thankful to Dr. Doug Koch, who wrote the foreword and the endorsement for this book. So we hope that trainees but also practitioners will pick this book up and give it a chance and hopefully view this as a new presentation of a subject, which has been historically hated, but we hope that will be now historically, folks will be enthusiasts about.

So thank you for your attention. And the book is available on Springer link. So it's published by Springer, but also available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, all of the major online retailers. So yeah, so check it out. Thank you for your kind attention.