This research proposal from a multi-disciplinary team including an emergency medicine physician, ophthalmologists, and biomedical engineers seeks to improve the ability of acute care providers to diagnose and triage eye pathology at the point of care. Acute care settings such as emergency departments frequently take care of patients seeking eye care. In these acute care settings, standard of care instruments to examine the eye are notoriously difficult to use and interpret, and specialty ophthalmic care can be delayed or unavailable. To improve the ability of acute care providers to diagnose and triage these patients appropriately, we will introduce an optical coherence tomography (OCT) system specifically for this environment. This OCT system will have hardware and software innovations to maximize the ability of acute care providers to acquire accurate, high quality three-dimensional volumes of their patients' eyes. With these three-dimensional renders of the eye, acute care providers can view the patient's eye on a display from any perspective to identify pathologies such as macular edema from diabetes or optic nerve head swelling from increased intracranial pressure. These developments have both direct immediate clinical and research applicability by providing acute care providers with the ability to readily examine patient eyes in three-dimensions. In addition, there are future implications as a platform for remote diagnostic capabilities in other settings where specialty eye care may be limited.
The proposed research is relevant to public health because it is expected to improve the ability of acute care providers to accurately diagnose and triage patients with ocular pathology presenting to the acute care environment (such as Emergency Departments). Leveraging innovative imaging technologies developed by our laboratories and modified specifically for the acute care environment, we expect to equip acute care providers with modern three-dimensional imaging techniques that will make it easier to examine the eye than current standard of care. This provides the potential to improve eye diagnostics at the point of care by non-eye specialist providers who frequently encounter those seeking eye care.
