The importance of peripheral diabetic retinopathy.

When I was first learning about diabetic retinopathy 4 decades ago, I was fortunate to be personally tutored by Drs. Lloyd M. Aiello, Matthew Davis, and Arnall Patz. They all stressed the importance of lesions in the retinal periphery. Of course, they emphasized that this was a frequent site of neovascularization, but they also taught us to focus on other major lesions of nonproliferative diabetic retinopathy. In particular, they emphasized both extensive hemorrhages/ microaneurysms and “featureless retina” as indications of peripheral nonperfusion. These peripheral lesions were elegantly and laboriously imaged in that era by Dr. Koichi