Ophthalmoscope for the detection of diabetes mellitus and heart disease

History

2024: Product Announcement

In mid-October 2024, American researchers presented an ophthalmoscope that allows you to detect diabetes mellitus and heart disease from an eye scan.

The bulk of the study was conducted by a team of researchers from Indiana University, Northwestern University, Stanford University and New York ENT Hospital. According to the developers, the next generation ophthalmoscopy allows you to suspect a number of diseases: not only diabetes mellitus and heart disease, but also kidney disease, sickle cell disease and even Alzheimer's disease.

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interestingengineering.com

We hope to provide doctors with an accurate tool for non-invasive diagnosis of a wide variety of diseases, says Stephen A. Burns, professor at Indiana University's School of Optometry. Burns was appointed principal investigator as part of a three-year clinical trial that received a $4.8 grant from the National Institutes of Health's (NIH) Oculomics Initiative program.

As part of the study, the development of new generation ophthalmoscopes was carried out, which will be able to detect barely noticeable changes in the eye, indicating hidden health problems. Burns and colleagues have been working on ophthalmoscopes to identify a range of diseases since the early 2000s. As a result, Burns' lab developed an ophthalmoscope to view the back of the human eye at very high resolution (2 μm) and record the movement of red blood cells in real time. Using this technology, Burns and colleagues were able to identify biomarkers of diabetes mellitus and hypertension as changes in the retinal and eyeball vasculature.

In turn, researchers at Northwestern and Stanford Universities used the technology to evaluate different parts of the eye, including blood vessels and photoreceptors. Changes to these structures make it possible to diagnose conditions such as sickle cell disease, the researchers said.^[1]

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