As a pediatric ophthalmologist, I do my best to assure that every young patient I examine will have a lifetime of perfect sight. The condition that I battle most commonly is amblyopia, or “lazy eye,” in which the eye is healthy but does not develop vision — simply because the brain doesn’t receive proper input when a child’s visual system is “learning” how to see.
When I can diagnose amblyopia early enough, I can treat it with an eye patch or eye drops to block the “good” eye, giving the eye with amblyopia time to catch up. But amblyopia does not fight fairly: about half of affected kids have no visible signs of the condition. As a result, amblyopia silently steals the sight of hundreds of thousands of children — many of whom will never get their vision back because treatment started too late.
It is this problem that inspired me to develop the Pediatric Vision Scanner (PVS). I am also trained as an engineer, and more than 20 years ago, while working with my mentor David Guyton, MD, at Johns Hopkins, we had an idea of how to help pediatricians and school nurses readily identify kids with amblyopia and its companion condition, strabismus (misaligned eyes).
When the eye focuses on a target, the image lines up with a particular area of the retina, the fovea. Knowing that the fovea has certain optical properties, Dr. Guyton wondered whether we could use polarized laser light to scan the retina and find the fovea. If so, this would tell us where the eye was looking.
Read the full post on Vector: Amblyopia detection: A long climb to market for the Pediatric Vision Scanner
The opinions expressed in this blog post are the author’s only and do not necessarily reflect those of MassDevice.com or its employees.
The post The long hike: A pediatric vision scanner’s journey to market appeared first on MassDevice.
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