Ear Nose Throat (ENTs) specialists and other healthcare professionals that diagnose and treat middle ear disease need to know if the patient has an infection, whether that infection is bacterial or viral, and determine some measure of the severity of the infection. They need to be able to make this assessment quickly because their interpretation of the middle ear health is the basis for significant interventional treatment, such as the prescription of antibiotics or decision to perform interventional surgery to minimize pain, illness, hearing loss, and delays in speech and language development. Despite the obvious importance and prevalence of this disease, the clinical gold standard for diagnosing ear infections is essentially a magnifying glass. The otoscope is a tool healthcare professionals use to evaluate middle ear health. The problem is that the otoscope only allows visualization of the surface of the eardrum, when the disease actually takes place in the middle ear. This team has developed a handheld medical device that can not only view the surface of the eardrum, but can also see through the eardrum and into the middle ear. The proposed improved diagnostics will lead to better clinical outcomes due to better management of antibiotics and interventional surgery.
The proposed technology uses harmless near-infrared light to produce three-dimensional images of the eardrum and middle ear contents. This provides physicians access to a wealth of new information, such as eardrum thickness, which has shown to vary with infection severity, effusion purulence, which is a strong indicator of the degree of infection, and most importantly, the presence or absence of a bacterial biofilm, which has been linked to chronic recurrent cases of ear infection that are generally resistant to antibiotic therapy. With 3-D information, quantitative measures and metrics can be visualized and recorded for objective diagnoses and longitudinal monitoring of therapeutic interventions. The device is used in the same way that a traditional otoscope is used, and since it can provide objective measurements, it allows a technician or nurse to obtain the same quality of diagnostic information as that of an experienced physician.
