But when Wellenstein’s late wife, Monika ’85, was suffering from lupus, the physicist turned his gaze toward a very concrete problem. As a side effect of the autoimmune disorder, Monika developed dry-eye syndrome. Wellenstein began to look for tactics to make treating the situation much less uncomfortable for her and other patients.
Dry-eye syndrome can harm the eye’s surface, creating ridges, bumps, rough patches and gaps. To treat it, Monika wanted scleral lenses, similar to contact lenses however giant sufficient to cowl a lot of the sclera, the white outer region of the eyeball. The lenses form a seal with the sclera, creating a chamber that may hold saline resolution or different fluids. The liquid bathes and lubricates the attention floor, offering relief from burning, itching and blurred vision.
But a scleral lens must form a perfect seal to forestall the liquid from escaping. And the attention isn’t an ideal sphere. Wellenstein watched his wife endure the discomfort-and sometimes ache-of repeated fittings, because the ophthalmologist searched for the precise lens form. It took days to get the match proper. As her disease progressed, Monika needed to be refitted for lenses a number of times.
“I was all the time asking the doctors if there was something I may do to help,” says Wellenstein.
Although he was not capable of develop a solution in time to assist his wife, Wellenstein is now placing the ending touches on Sclervey, a system to survey the sclera so patients with dry-eye syndrome and other corneal diseases can be fitted for lenses extra effectively. Two undergraduates-Forrest Webler ’14. Dave Matthews ’18-played main roles in growing Sclervey.
“It was simply unimaginable to work on something that has real-world applications and might change folks’s lives,” says Matthews.
The Sclervey is a concave dish, which is placed about four inches from the patient’s eye. The dish is divided into segments shaped like pizza slices, each containing a panel of roughly two dozen LED lights. When the lights go on-they’re dimmer than a cell-cellphone display so they won’t harm the eye-cameras positioned around the dish photograph the eye, capturing the placement of the sunshine spots projected onto the sclera. Changes within the sclera’s contours alter the light spots’ positions.
To interpret the data, Wellenstein and his students needed software that could map the pictures generated by Sclervey into a 3-D picture of the sclera. If you enjoyed this post and you would certainly like to get additional facts relating to LED panel lighting (your domain name) kindly go to our website. The software must detect variations between the factors of mild as small as 50 microns, about half the width of a human hair.
This is the place Wellenstein drew on his experience at the massive Hadron Collider.
When protons touring at near the speed of light are smashed together inside the collider, a set of new subatomic particles are launched. Wellenstein and his colleagues developed software that screens the detectors that hint the pathways taken by the new particles.
It seems that the identical software is ready to analyze the patterns of light spots in the photographs taken by Sclervey’s cameras. Indeed, the machine detected variations as small as 15 microns. Next, it created a 3-D image of the sclera that, in idea, an ophthalmologist can use to create a scleral lens. Instead of resorting to trial and error, docs should be capable of create a perfect fit the primary outing.
The next big step? Wellenstein and his lab hope to discover a associate, possibly a nonprofit, to begin clinical testing on humans.