A Novel Image Based Screening System for Early Detection of Age related Macular Degeneration

PROJECT SUMMARY In this SBIR Phase I proposal we aim to develop a retinal imaging based automated screening system to identify individuals at an early or intermediate stage of age related macular degeneration AMD and thus enable treatment to prevent late AMD Late AMD in the dry or wet form is the leading cause of vision loss in the developed countries The Age Related Eye Disease Study AREDS showed that specific antioxidant vitamin supplementation reduces the risk of progression from intermediate stages to late AMD and maintains visual acuity in approximately of patients Indeed there is no present treatment for dry advanced AMD While treatment of wet AMD with Intraocular injections can be effective in maintaining vision such treatments are costly and may be associated with significant cardiovascular risks or even progression of dry AMD While the direct impact of AMD is vision loss it has other indirect complications such as depression social dependency and risk of fall and injury Hence it is critical to identify patients at the earlier stages Unfortunately there is no effective automated large scale screening tool to accomplish this and the patients themselves may be asymptomatic The goal of this proposal is to provide such a tool The current few screening systems are mainly semi automatic and rely on color fundus CF photography to identify drusen the classic lesions of early AMD However no screening system captures Reticular Pseudo Drusen RPD a recently found and common early AMD lesion that carries an even worse prognosis for late AMD than ordinary drusen Therefore we will utilize both CF photography for drusen and high contrast Red free RF imaging for RPD detection in a multimodal automatic screening tool to detect both forms of early AMD with high accuracy Furthermore lack of ophthalmologists in underserved areas may preclude the timely detection of early AMD Therefore we will next incorporate our screening tool in a telemedicine platform that can be deployed in such underserved areas to identify patients with AMD for referral to an ophthalmologist In the current proposal we will develop and validate the necessary algorithms to demonstrate that an automated screening system for early intermediate AMD is feasible In our Phase II SBIR proposal we will develop and test the complete system along with CF and RF retinal image capture devices that can be suitable for use of our system in a telemedicine platform PROJECT NARRATIVE Age related macular degeneration AMD in its late forms dry or wet is the leading cause of blindness in developed countries Early intervention and therapy can significantly reduce progression of early to late AMD Hence identification of patients with early AMD and referral to an ophthalmologist is critically needed to help prevent vision loss To achieve this goal we propose to develop an automated screening system that can be widely deployed to identify these individuals at risk of vision loss