An 83-year-old monocular male presented with complaints of new floaters in his right eye. His visual acuity was counting fingers, intraocular pressure was 8 mmHg with 3+ cells in his anterior chamber, and a dense vitritis. Ultrasound confirmed vitritis with an attached retina. The patient was seen by a referring ophthalmologist the day before with similar complaints of floaters with visual acuity of 20/40 due to nuclear sclerosis.\nThe patient had been no light perception in his left eye for over a year due to endogeneous endophthalmitis from a fungal lung lesion. At that time, both vitreous and lung biopsies grew out S. apiospermum. Other than diabetes, a thorough infectious disease work-up revealed no other immunocompromising risk factors. The lung lesions were unchanged after a course of treatment, and the patient’s family did not want further work-up such as a re-biopsy due to the patient’s age. The patient was prescribed a maintenance dose of voriconazole 200 mg PO QD, but he was noncompliant and stopped taking his medicine.\nAt the time of presentation to our clinic, the patient had symptoms in his right eye for less than 24 h. An intravitreal biopsy was performed in conjunction with intravitreal voriconazole (100 μg/0.1 ml). Vitreous biopsy at this time grew out S. aspiospermum. The patient was also started on intravenous voriconazole. After 48 h with no improvement, the patient was brought to the operating room for a 23-gauge pars plana vitrectomy and repeat intravitreal voriconazole (100 μg/0.1 ml) injection. There were no intraretinal lesions seen at the time of surgery, although the view was hazy. The patient did not receive any intravitreal or oral steroids. His inflammation subsided slowly over the course of 3 weeks with moxifloxacin and prednisolone acetate eye drops. One month after presentation, his visual acuity returned to 20/40.
A 69-year-old Japanese woman had a macular oedema in her right eye, which occurred secondary to BRVO and was unresponsive to intravitreal injection of anti-vascular endothelial growth factor aflibercept. She was subsequently treated by STTA injection at the referral hospital twice. During the treatments, her eye was anaesthetized with 4% topical lidocaine. A sterilized eyelid speculum was used, and the superior-temporal conjunctiva was incised using sterilized scissors to inject 20 mg of triamcinolone acetonide into the posterior subtenon space. After the injection, the conjunctiva was not sutured because this step is usually unnecessary. These procedures were performed in an outpatient treatment room with wearing sterilized gloves. A 1.5% topical levofloxacin ophthalmic solution was administered four times daily for 3 days post-injection. Four months after the second injection, the patient noted a conjunctival mass that became progressively larger with a little pain and redness. She was then referred to Kindai University with a clinical diagnosis of orbital fat herniation.\nDuring her first visit, best-corrected visual acuity (BCVA) was 6/30 in the right eye and 6/6 in the left eye. Intraocular pressure was normal in both eyes. Slit-lamp microscopic examination revealed no inflammation in both the anterior chamber and vitreous. A soft, well-demarcated mass mimicking herniated orbital fat was observed in the super-temporal quadrant, which corresponded to the posterior STTA site (Fig. a). Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of the orbits revealed a hypo-intensity lesion on T2-weighted imaging at the super-temporal peribulbar area (Fig. b). Her white cell count and C reactive protein levels were normal.\nTo excise the conjunctival mass, first, we made an incision in the conjunctiva, and found that yellowish pus was discharged. The local administration of antibiotics was performed empirically based on the presumed diagnosis of bacterial infection. Although a strain of dematiaceous fungi was isolated from the pus 1 month later, the antifungal drug susceptibility of the strain was not determined at that time. We did not immediately administer antifungal drugs because there were no significant changes in clinical findings initially. The abscess was debrided again 2 months after the surgery through a superior forniceal incision because the orbital abscess at the same lesion had developed gradually. During the second surgery, the wound was irrigated with 0.1% amphotericin B after three large abscesses were removed. Postoperatively, she was treated with 400 mg/day of oral voriconazole because of Fungiflora Y staining of the pus (Fig. a) and the presence of a large amount of fungi by pathological examination of the abscess by Grocott’s staining (Fig. b).\nWe obtained the pathogenic strain from the abscess during the second surgery and observed it macroscopically and microscopically. The colony on potato dextrose agar medium (PDA; Difco, Becton, Dickinson and Company, Sparks, USA) had a diameter of 10 mm 14 days after inoculation and with incubation at 25 °C. The colony appeared as a moist-form pigmented yeast-like colony (Fig. a). The slide culture using lactophenol cotton blue staining revealed cylindrical conidogenous cells producing ellipsoidal conidia (Fig. b). From the Basic Local Alignment Search Tool search using the sequence of the ribosomal RNA gene internal transcribed spacer domain base, the sequence (the accession number LC566592 in the DDBJ) of this strain showed 100% similarity to those of some strains of E. dermatitidis. The isolate was thus identified as E. dermatitidis on the basis of morphology and phylogeny. The pathogenic strain in the current case was deposited at the Medical Mycology Center, Chiba University in Japan, as IFM 65961.\nMinimum inhibitory concentrations (MICs) of several antifungal drugs and the minimal effective concentration of micafungin against the strain were determined using of the broth dilution method according to M38-A2 of the Clinical and Laboratory Standard Institute (Table ). The inhibitory concentrations of amphotericin B, itraconazole, voriconazole, and miconazole against the pathogenic strain were found to be low. Based on these results, topical and systemic voriconazole were administered for 3 months. The patient’s serum beta-D-glucan levels were normal during the follow-up periods since the first surgery, and no recurrence was observed after the second drainage.