MY INVENTION SAVED

When Douglas Anderson’s five-year-old son lost sight in one eye from a detached retina, he created a device so that others didn’t suffer the same fate. BUSOLA EVANS reports

WHEN five-year-old Leif Anderson lost the sight in his left eye because a retinal detachment was diagnosed too late, his devastated father vowed no other parent should have to face a similar heartbreak.

Despite regular eye examinations, clinicians missed the warning signs that led to the loss but with more thorough testing Leif’s condition would have been detected and he would likely have retained his vision.

So medical technology designer Douglas set about inventing a fast, non-intrusive whole-retina scanner, which was patient-friendly enough for a five-year-old but would give examiners a full view of the eye, unlike the partial glimpse which most machines provided at the time. The result was Optos, which uses laser technology to monitor any changes in the eye that would otherwise go undetected using traditional examination techniques and equipment.

Not only is the scanner now used in hospitals across the country, the machine also helped save the vision in Leif’s other eye after it detected a new retina problem several years later.

The technological innovation is now celebrating 11 years since it was recognised with the Royal Academy of Engineering MacRobert Award, the UK’s most prestigious prize in the field and known as the Oscars of the engineering world.

There are about 11,000 devices worldwide and a staggering 70-100 million people have been imaged using the scanner, potentially saving the sight of millions globally.

It was an achievement Douglas, 66, could have not imagined when he was reeling from the news that Leif had irrecoverably lost his vision in one eye.

“It was a very emotional time,” admits Douglas, from Fife in Scotland, who was running his own design consultancy developing medical products.

“I reflected on the reason my son lost his left eye – he had a top-rated clinician and you don’t get in front of one of them unless you’re already advanced with some kind of symptomatic disease. The people who tend to do standard eye examinations on children are opticians or junior doctors and because of the uncooperative nature of many young children, the chances of a full retina examination were about 20 per cent. So chances were that lots of problems went undiagnosed until it was too late.”

Although Leif’s right eye was being monitored, Douglas worried it could suffer the same fate as the left.

“Our clinician tried to reassure me about what he could see but I became progressively less convinced about his ability to do a full retinal examination on a small child.”

FROM this point, Douglas decided that there was a need for a device which gave a high-quality retina examination, particularly for difficult patients.

“I thought the manual examination being used was out of date. When I thought of other disciplines such as cardiology and orthopaedics, they had much better imaging systems available to do comprehensive examinations.

“Ophthalmology, on the other