SFU engineer develops better scanner to detect eye diseases

VANCOUVER (CP) — A British Columbia engineering science professor has developed a high-resolution scanner that he says will revolutionize how eye diseases are diagnosed to prevent vision loss.

Professor Marinko Sarunic of Simon Fraser University said doctors currently use low-resolution scanners that can assess the cause of patients’ dead retina cells.

“Because the resolution is low, they don’t detect small changes, they detect big changes,” he said. “What we want is to see the changes to the retinal structure before they’re obvious in a person's vision.”

A scanner built on billiard-sized tables is now used at a few universities in the world for research purposes but it’s too big and complicated for routine diagnosis of diseases such as glaucoma, diabetic retinopathy and macular degeneration, Sarunic said.

“The problem is the technology is so inaccessible that it’s not in a place where it can help. We want to bring the technology to the clinics, to the front lines, where it does have the potential to help.”

His scanner is about the size of a shoe box and uses medical imaging, or optical coherence tomography, for 3-D cross-sectional images of the retina.

The technology is being licensed to a British Columbia-based startup company.