Retinal selfie
Taking a selfie is easy: just point your smartphone toward your face and shoot. But taking a selfie of the interior of an eye is impossible, imaging specialists might’ve told you, until now.
Researchers at the Camera Culture Group, headed by Ramesh Raskar at the MIT Media Lab, have designed the eyeSelfie, an inexpensive hand-held device for taking a photograph of the retina, the optic nerve, and the vasculature, which is located all the way at the back of one’s eye.
Digital snapshots of the interior of the eye can help physicians detect and treat vision-threatening diseases such as glaucoma, macular degeneration, and diabetic retinopathy early. New research indicates that the snapshots can also be used to identify risks factors for hypertension, heart disease, multiple sclerosis, and Alzheimer’s disease.
“The eyeSelfie makes retinal self-imaging possible for the first time,” says Tristan Swedish, a MIT graduate student who will be demonstrating the prototype at SIGGRAPH, a premier annual conference for makers of graphic and interactive technologies, which will be held in Los Angeles later this week. (MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito will be on hand at this year’s conference as the keynote speaker.)
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