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

超过2100万美国人和全球2.85亿人在法律上失明或视力低下。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及时诊断和决定治疗。因此，迫切需要提供一种临床工具，其比眼睛中表现出的不可逆的解剖学改变更早地检测微小的生理异常。 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提供几种威胁视力的疾病的最早警告，包括糖尿病视网膜病变，黄斑生成和青光眼。所提出的解决方案依赖于新颖的光学相干断层扫描技术，在可见光和近红外光谱范围内工作，以及复杂的逆算法来提取毛细血管水平的视网膜血流和视网膜血氧。该创新的主要优点在于，我们的设备通过提供视网膜中的显微解剖信息以及视网膜氧代谢信息，提高了临床医生的诊断和治疗能力。如果没有这些功能信息，临床医生必须依赖于一个可辨别的结构异常，以确定疾病的阶段，这往往是一旦疾病已经是先进的，难以治疗。拟议的代谢光学相干断层扫描开辟了新的窗口，定量风险评估和管理的视力丧失疾病的早期阶段。此外，这项技术的商业化最终将有助于降低社会医疗成本，并提高美国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.