Massachusetts Patent of the Month – January 2021

Recent sports related fatalities have highlighted the importance of recognizing and diagnosing head trauma in contact sports, such as football. Head trauma can result in serious brain dysfunction that is hard to diagnose without scans and surgical interventions. A measure of determining if there is a head injury is assessing eye fixation. But current methods of measuring eye fixation are very time consuming, require a lot of equipment and have low levels of accuracy of assessing retinal position. They’re also not good at controlling other factors that may have an effect on eye fixation during assessment, such as lighting changes, distance and direction of a device, etc. So, REBIScan, Inc. developed an improved device and method for ophthalmic neural scanning. 

REBIScan’s device uses image projection onto the retina of the individual being assessed. The light is first reflected off an axicon lens, so the light becomes a circular projection, then a toroidal lens, so the light can be focussed into a ring image. The light is then reflected off the retina when projected into the individual’s eye. The device then captures the reflection from the retina, which shows whether or not the individual displays eye fixation symptoms. The device uses photodetectors for this process.

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