According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, glaucoma remains the leading cause of irreversible blindness worldwide, affecting almost 80 million people in 2020. If not treated early, this condition can lead to gradual loss of vision or permanent blindness. Conventional treatments, even the expensive ones, cannot reverse the eye damage brought by glaucoma.
In response to this challenge, a sophomore student at Wheeler High School in Marietta, Georgia, built a portable, inexpensive detection device to diagnose this medical condition accurately.
A Novel Multimodal Diagnosis & Prevention System
Teenager Rohan Kalia began researching an affordable strategy for detecting glaucoma when one of his family members was diagnosed with this eye condition. This led him to invent a novel device called EyePal which enables accessible and individualized detection of glaucoma.
Eye conditions such as glaucoma are detected from standard examination, where images are taken from the retinal fundus. The photos are typically captured by an ophthalmologist using specialized equipment. However, the diagnosis and prevention of glaucoma are not widely accessible worldwide, especially in areas with a lack of eye doctors and testing facilities. This was the issue that Kalia tried to solve in this EyePal invention.
The EyePal comprises a quality camera, a Raspberry Pi minicomputer, machine-learning technology, and a mobile application. It works by taking images of the fundus and sending them to a mobile device that an eye specialist can examine. When it was tested on sets of fundus images, EyePal showed 95% accuracy.
Kalia's invention was presented at the Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) held from May 14 - 19 at Dallas, Texas. It won this year's President's Scholarship worth U.S. $10,000. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Foundation established the award to acknowledge students who demonstrate exceptional skills in the IEEE field of interest.
The second-and third-place winners were also awarded a complimentary IEEE student membership. EyePal also got the third-place award in the ISEF's systems software category, which earned Kalia a $1,000 prize.
What is Glaucoma?
Glaucoma is a group of eye diseases that can cause loss of vision due to damage to the optic nerve, which is responsible for sending messages from the eyes to the brain. It falls under different categories: open-angle, angle-closure, and congenital glaucoma.
Experts are still unsure about the causes of the most common types of glaucoma, although those diagnosed with this condition have high eye pressure. Glaucoma can affect anyone, although risk factors include age, race, and family history.
At its early stage, glaucoma does not show any symptoms without the patient realizing that they have it. Over time, a person may gradually lose vision, starting from the side (peripheral vision) and the area near the nose. As the disease gets worse, the affected individual may begin noticing that they fail to see things off to the side. If not treated properly, this can eventually lead to blindness.
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