OCT
Latest
High-tech solutions top the list in the fight against eye disease
"The eyes are the window to the soul," the adage goes, but these days our eyes could be better compared to our ethernet connection to the world. According to a 2006 study conducted by the University of Pennsylvania, the human retina is capable of transmitting 10 million bits of information per second. But for as potent as our visual capabilities are, there's a whole lot that can go wrong with the human eye. Cataracts, glaucoma and age-related macular degeneration (AMD) are three of the leading causes of blindness the world over. Though we may not have robotic ocular prosthetics just yet, a number of recent ophthalmological advancements will help keep the blinds over those windows from being lowered.
MIT researchers develop speedy retina scanner to diagnose ocular diseases
Although the mere mention of "retinal scanner" may get the blood boiling in privacy advocates, the latest such device out of MIT sports a much more innocent soul. Researchers at the school have reportedly developed a method to "scan the retina at record speeds of up to 236,000 lines per second, or ten-times faster than current technology." This process will allow doctors to snap "high detailed 3D images of the eye," which can be used to non-invasively spot ocular diseases such as diabetic retinopathy, glaucoma, and age-related macular degeneration much earlier and more accurately. The process itself is dubbed optical coherence tomography (OCT), and while things seem to moving along as scheduled, it will still be "five years or more" before we see this thing commercialized.[Via MedLaunches]
