I-Corps: Opticent Health-Functional Imaging For Early Disease Detection.

超过2100万美国人和全球2.85亿人要么合法失明，要么视力低下。虽然80%的视力损害是可以预防或治愈的，但眼科医生目前缺乏足够的资源来做出及时的诊断和治疗决定。因此，迫切需要提供一种临床工具，在眼睛中表现出不可逆转的解剖变化之前，更早地发现微小的生理异常。该团队开发了最先进的视网膜成像技术，可以在目前的临床实践之前对几种威胁视力的疾病提供最早的警告，包括糖尿病视网膜病变、黄斑生成和青光眼。提出的解决方案依赖于新的光学相干断层扫描技术，工作在可见光和近红外光谱范围内，以及复杂的逆算法，在毛细血管水平提取视网膜血流和视网膜血氧。这项创新的关键优点来自于这样一个事实，即我们的设备通过提供视网膜氧代谢以及视网膜的微观解剖信息来提高临床医生的诊断和治疗能力。在没有这种功能信息的情况下，临床医生必须依靠可辨别的结构异常来确定疾病阶段，这通常发生在疾病已经晚期且难以治疗的时候。新陈代谢光学相干断层扫描为视力损失疾病的早期定量风险评估和管理开辟了新的窗口。此外，将这项技术商业化最终将有助于降低社会医疗成本，并提高仅在美国就有数百万患者的生活质量。

More than 21 million Americans and 285 million people worldwide are either legally blind or with low vision. While 80% of all visual impairment can be prevented or cured, ophthalmologists presently lack adequate resources to make timely diagnoses and decisions regarding treatment. Hence, there is an urgent need to provide a clinical tool that detects minute physiological abnormalities much earlier than irreversible anatomical alternations manifest in the eye. This team has developed the state-of-the-art retinal imaging technologies to provide the earliest warnings of several vision threatening diseases, including diabetic retinopathy, macular generation, and glaucoma, well before current clinical practices can achieve. The proposed solution relies on novel optical coherence tomography technology, working within both visible-light and near infrared spectral ranges, and sophisticated inverse algorithms to extract both retinal blood flow and retinal blood oxygenation at the capillary level. The key merit of the innovation comes from the fact that our device improves clinicians' diagnostic and treatment capabilities by providing retinal oxygen metabolic in addition to microscopic anatomical information in the retina. Without such functional information, clinicians must rely on a discernible structural abnormality to determine the disease stage, which oftentimes comes once the disease is already advanced and difficult to treat. The proposed metabolic optical coherence tomography opens up new window for quantitative risk evaluation and management of vision loss diseases at early stage. Moreover, commercializing this technology will ultimately help to reduce the societal healthcare costs and improve the quality of lives of millions of patients in the US alone.