An online screening tool from Carl Zeiss Vision enables visitors to test their visual acuity, contrast vision, and color vision. Designed for people who wear glasses or contacts as well as those who don’t, the site was developed for the company’s “100 Years of Zeiss Precision Lenses” anniversary and as part of Healthy Vision Month. The site provides instructions that enable the user’s computer monitor to be configured to optimize the accuracy of the test, including instructions for how to achieve the correct settings for screen calibration, gamma calibration (brightness), and how far the eyes should be from the monitor. Results from the test come back within five minutes or less to let the user know if their vision is good, average or poor.

To learn more about the platform, Medgadget spoke to Jeff Hopkins, Carl Zeiss Vision’s senior manager of professional affairs.

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Scientists at the Stanford University School of Medicine are developing a new type of retinal prosthesis which aims to simplify the complex surgery associated with existing, bulkier implants. The prosthetic comprises a pair of goggles and an implanted retinal sensor made up of an array of light-sensitive photodiodes.

The goggles incorporate a miniature camera, a pocket computer for processing the camera data, and an LCD screen embedded into the goggles for displaying the data. The LCD screen beams images using laser pulses of near-infrared light to a photovoltaic ultra thin silicon chip implanted beneath the retina. The chip, in turn, translates the infra-red pulses to neural pulses in the retina which can be processed as images in the brain. The key selling point for the new implant is the elimination of wires and cables and the relative simplicity of implantation.

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NIDEK (Gamagori, Japan) has received FDA clearance to market its AFC-330 fundus camera in the U.S. The unit is an all-in-one system that contains both the camera and the processing computer, negating the need for another machine to remain nearby.

The device is the company’s most automated model, and features automatic alignment along the three axis, uses a lower brightness flash, and has dampened mechanical components, among other advances.

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The eye has its own connectome, the neuronal network of the retina that processes the incoming signals before it sends them off to the brain. Much of its structure is yet unknown, and now researchers are looking into the powers of crowdsourcing to process the vast amounts of data they have acquired on the structure. Eyewire, developed by neuroscientists at MIT, comprises a game that requires the players to connect the neurons in a small piece of the retina.

The data for analysis consists of a retinal volume with a size of 350×300×60 μm3 that was imaged using serial electron microscopy at the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg, Germany. In total it amounts to about one terabyte of data. Although the analysis of these images to find connectomes can be automated to some extent, a lot of it is still manual work and this can be very time-consuming. By incorporating a game-like element and engaging a crowd from all over the world the researchers hope to speed up their analyses.

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Heads-up displays (HUD) offer the potential of providing all kinds of useful information to their users, but they all suffer from the same problem: their close proximity to the eyes makes it difficult to focus on what’s displayed, limiting their usefulness in many augmented reality applications.

Innovega, a company out of Bellevue, Washington, has developed a contact lens with dual focus capability that allows its wearer to see distant objects normally and at the same time receive a focused image from the proximate display. The technology, originally funded in part with money from the Pentagon, will soon be on its way to U.S. Dept. of Defense labs for evaluation. While initially destined to be applied for military uses, the iOptik lenses may soon be available to consumers for all sorts of applications like augmented reality displays and 3D video.

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2014 may well end up being be the year of the bionic eye.  At least that’s the goal of engineers from the Monash Vision Group (MVG) of Monash University in Australia. They’ve recently had extremely positive early laboratory results for a new microchip that will power a bionic eye, and are on track for having one ready for patient testing in a couple years.

Unlike many other bionic eye/retinal implant projects currently in development, MVG’s bionic eye bypasses the  actual eye altogether. The system consists of a special pair of glasses with a tiny camera that acts as the retina, a pocket-worn processor for converting the video into electrical signals, and the microchips themselves that are implanted directly on the surface of the patient’s visual cortex. The microchip complex consists of a grid of up to 14 eight-by-eight microchips, themselves consisting of over half a million transistors and 45 thin electrodes for receiving low-resolution black-and-white video and stimulating the visual cortex.

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Researchers from the Seoul National University College of Medicine have used Nintendo Wii game controllers to help diagnose ocular torticollis, a medical condition in which the head is tilted to one side to compensate for certain eye pathology. They have reported their findings in the current issue of Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual Sciences.

The infrared optical head tracker (IOHT) was created by fixating the two Wii controllers to a mechanical frame and connecting them to a computer via Bluetooth. Infrared LEDs were placed on a frame and placed on the forehead. This way, movements by the head can be registered by the Wii controllers. The IOHT setup was compared with a standard cervical range of motion (CROM) device. This is one of the most widely used head posture measuring devices. The two setups were compared for one-dimensional and three-dimensional head posture measurements in normal adults. The comparison showed that in terms of accuracy, validity and reliability, the Wii setup measurements were very close to those of the CROM device.

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Progressive lenses made their commercial debut in the middle of the last century. Also known as progressive addition lenses (PAL), the lenses enable eyeglass wearers to transition from distance to near vision without the image jumping when the eyes shift from one distance zone to another. They also have a cosmetic benefit: there is no line as there is with bifocals.

In the past, producing these lenses was no easy feat. The traditional process required a semi-finished lens with a standard front. The prescription would be ground onto the back surface with a generator. Calculating the geometry to impart on the lens involves complicated mathematics. “You can imagine doing this without Excel spreadsheets to do all of your calculations,” says Dennis Fong, OD, clinical instructor at the UC Berkeley School of Optometry. “Everything was originally done by hand and then you see pictures of these old generators that made forms and then you use the forms to create the complex curvature.”

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TearScience of Morrisville, NC received FDA clearance for the new version of the LipiFlow Thermal Pulsation System for evaporative dry eye. The condition leaves patients with too few tears, making the remaining ones feel too salty. The system heats and massages the eyelids, helping unblock the flow of lipids from the meibomian glands found under the eyelids.

The new generation of LipiFlow provides the ability to two treat both eyes simultaneously, cutting treatment time in half, to about 12 minutes. It also sports a new interface that displays treatment temperature, pressure sequence and treatment time remaining, while recording all the data for easy sharing with the clinic’s electronic medical record system.

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Researchers from the University of Tennessee Space Institute are developing a device which should make eye exams in children a whole lot simpler. The device is called the Dynamic Ocular Evaluation System (DOES) and it can screen the eyes for abnormalities, while the children watch a cartoon or play a computer game. Here’s how it works:

“DOES is low-cost, high-quality, and operator- and child-friendly. It takes about a minute to train someone to use it. The test is done as the child watches a three-minute cartoon or plays a computer game. Infrared light is used to analyze the binocular condition and the assessment is reported on-site within a minute. Neither eye dilation nor verbal response is required.

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