As Cynthia Toth, MD, prepares to "dive" inside the eye, she practices a relaxed mind. "Slow breath, focus, concentrate," she tells herself. In 30 years as a retinal surgeon, she has trained to make her left hand as proficient as her right, so she can smoothly reach the part of the retina she needs to.
Toth is rewarded with immersion in an ocean of color. "When you use the operating microscope, it's like you're a deep-sea diver," she said. "The whole world in there is glowing orange. It's just fun and beautiful."
Toth's love of exploring the retina has led to her revolutionizing retinal imaging for both adult and pediatric ophthalmology. The Joseph A.C. Wadsworth Distinguished Professor of Ophthalmology, she is a world expert in a high-resolution, three-dimensional imaging technology called optical coherence tomography, and she has pioneered its use during surgery and in very young children. Her research in this and other areas has led to better ways to diagnose and predict the course of blinding eye diseases such as macular degeneration and retinopathy of prematurity, one of the most common causes of childhood vision loss. Toth was instrumental in developing Duke Eye Center's Pediatric Retina Clinic, and she is the first female vice chair of clinical research in the Department of Ophthalmology.