url=“http://www.ornl.gov/info/press_releases/get_press_release.cfm?ReleaseNumber=mr20050208-00 ”]Well, maybe someday.
Millions of people at risk of becoming blind could one day be helped by an Oak Ridge National Laboratory technology originally intended to understand semiconductor defects.
They will develop an extensive image database of known retinal disease states for clinical validation studies.
Institutional Review Board approval was secured to enable Tobin and ORNL colleagues Tom Karnowski and Priya Govindasamy to assemble a database of thousands of fluorescein angiography and optical coherence tomography images representing hundreds of diagnosed human patients and retinal diseases.
“The dataset provided by Dr. Chaum documents the visual attributes of fluorescein angiography and optical coherence tomography imagery that are used to diagnose a wide range of pathologies,” Tobin said. “This is a necessary step to support developing our statistical feature descriptions for image indexing, retrieval and diagnosis.”
Tobin and Chaum expect this project to provide benefits not only for diagnosing and treating blinding diseases in broad-based population screening programs, but also for novel biomedical imaging and telemedicine.
Let’s hope it works out.
Whoo hoo! Optical coherence tomography! I tried to make one for an old job. They’re not easy to build. Nor are they cheap. But it’s a pretty damn cool piece of technology. Mine was supposed to be for glaucoma surgery, but sadly, I was underfunded, undermanned, and underinteligented.