The main focus is currently on diagnosing a condition called Retinopathy of Prematurity (ROP), which could lead to vision loss among infants. Dr Anand Vinekar, a pediatric retinal surgeon and the project coordinator at Narayana Nethralaya, said RoP must be treated in 48 to 72 hours to save the vision of the infants. However the problem is that just a handful of doctors are trained to recognize this condition and all of them invariably are based in cities.
Figures quoted by the World Health Organization in India show that 8.4% of 27 million babies weighing less than 2kg may be prone to develop this condition, which can be crippling early in life.
The new project is a part of Narayana Nethralaya's village outreach program in rural areas. The institute sent out qualified doctors to six areas for a pilot program to test the effectiveness of the software application. These doctors went to Bangalore Urban, Bangalore Rural, Mandya, Tumkur, Bidar and Gulbarga. Some 1,600 infants were screened among whom 160 were given treatment for RoP.
Dr Vinekar said the doctors were trained to use a wide-angle retinal digital camera to capture eye images. These images are then transferred to the computer and e-mailed to the Bangalore base. The hospital recently refined the system where the images were pushed directly to the concerned doctor's iPhone after initially being uploaded to a server using the Internet.
A company called i2i TeleSolutions has developed this software. It also hosts the application that pushes the images to the iPhone. Dr Vinekar said they chose to go with the iPhone as its pinch, drag and drop capabilities were hi-class when combined with good resolution. Images can also be enlarged without distortion.
The iPhone may be many things to many people, but to infants in remote areas it is literally acting as a lifesaver.
---
Autor(en)/Author(s): Sapna Mhatre
Quelle/Source: News Locale, 20.11.2009
Bitte besuchen Sie/Please visit:
