Chennai :

Very soon, if you go to an eye doctor with blurred vision, he may well point his iPhone at your eye and take a quick video. Surprised? It’s quite simple, really. Instead of peering into your eye to check if the lens is dislocated, city-based eye specialist Dr Amar Agarwal has begun using a smartphone app to get amazingly ‘slow’ results.

The surgeon has used the popular iOS app Slo-Mo (or TruSloMo) to capture images of the patient’s eye that can be frozen and viewed really easily, “Only when it’s a really obvious shift can we see it by looking through a magnifier. Otherwise, what we would do is take a normal video of a patient moving their eyes from side to side and pause it frame by frame to see which way it has shifted,” said the Chief Surgeon at Dr Agarwal’s Group of Eye Hospitals.

A dislocated lens can occur as a congenital issue or after an injury that causes trauma to the side of the head. It can cause blurred vision, progressively leading to blindness.

The problem with using a normal camera is that not only are the images shot at 25 frames per second (fps), the frozen frame would often be blurry and pixellated,

“These apps are amazing because they shoot at 250 fps and when the frames are looked at one by one, they’re almost in HD quality. We can see exactly how the lens has shifted and repair it with minimal surgery,” he added cheerfully. Apps that offer super-slow motion frames are readily available for both Android and iOS.

Having worked on the technique for over six months with around hundred patients, Dr Agarwal submitted the findings in a scientific paper to the Journal of Cataract and Refractive Surgery, which has been accepted. “Once it is published, this technique can be easily used anywhere across the world. Nobody has thought of such a simple solution to one of the more complex eye problems that has been affecting people,” he added.

This development comes after the news that British researchers have developed tools for a smartphone — including a plastic clip on lens over the camera and an app — that will allow just about anybody to conduct eyes tests on a patient, using a smartphone and was created to assess blindness-causing conditions in rural and backward regions.

source: http://www.newindianexpress.com / The New Indian Express / Home> Cities> Chennai / by Daniel Thimmayya / February 13th, 2015