Rice University engineers have developed a smart and simple method to image a patient’s eye that could help monitor eye health and spot signs of macular degeneration and diabetic retinopathy.

The patient-operated, portable device called mobileVision can be paired with a smartphone to give clinicians finely detailed images of the macula, the spot in the center of the eye where vision is sharpest. These images can then be sent to ophthalmologists who can make their diagnoses from afar, making the entire setup ideal for developing nations.

Generally, doctors have to dilate a patient’s eyes before an exam that often involves bulky, expensive equipment. The challenge for Rice engineers was to produce a portable device that provides high-quality images of the macula without dilation.

“When we talk to physicians about this project, the first question they always ask is, ‘Can you image the macula?'”Adam Samaniego, one of the engineers involved in the project said. “So that’s where we decided to focus our efforts.”

Built as part of Rice’s Scalable Health Initiative, the device looks and works something like a reverse microscope.

A patient looks into the eyepiece and sees a large dark red disk. When the system is shifted around freely, the appearance of the disk changes dramatically – appearing brightest and most uniform when perfectly aligned with the patient’s eye. When this happens, the patient hits a button that moves the target out of the way and allows the camera to see into the eye, with help from a battery-powered light source.

When the patient can clearly see the disk, the pupil is dilated and the system is aligned. Then, once the retina is illuminated, Samaniego said, “We have a window of only a few hundred milliseconds to snap as many frames as we can before the pupil constricts again.”

At that point, the patient’s job is done. In an ideal situation, Samaniego said, a mobile clinic anywhere in the world could use multiple mobileVision systems connected to smartphones to gather data from many patients very quickly.

The Rice team behind mobileVision includes Adam Samaniego, a Rice alumnus and research engineer; graduate student Vivek Boominathan; Ashutosh Sabharwal, a professor of electrical and computer engineering; and Ashok Veeraraghavan, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering.