Dr. Scheiman Participating in Grant-Funded Project

Dr. Scheiman Participating in First Objective Measurement Tool for VSC Project

Mitchell Scheiman, OD, PhD ‘16, director, graduate programs, biomedicine, is participating in a new National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant-funded project as part of Oculogica’s Phase I Small Business Technology Transfer Program (STTR) submission.
 
Dr. Scheiman joins a team from Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) that is executing a clinical study to investigate a software product called VisBox as a tool to identify a vision subtype of concussion (VSC), one of four subtypes of post-concussive disorder (PCD). Dr. Scheiman’s role in the study is to perform the gold standard and comprehensive vision examination, analyze data, and help prepare manuscripts for publication.
 
According to Blue Cross and Blue Shield (BCBS) medical claims data, there has been a significant increase in the number of concussions diagnosed annually across the country. While 80% of people who sustain a concussion recover in one to two weeks, others have persistent symptoms, such as prevalent vision problems or PCD. PCD is a serious condition in which symptoms associated with a concussion continue for more than three months and can put patients at an increased risk of developing second impact syndrome (SIS) if another concussion occurs during the same time period.
 
If successful, VisBox will be the first objective measurement tool to identify VSC in patients. It will ultimately enable neurologists, pediatricians, emergency room physicians, and sports medicine physicians to assess for VSC and refer patients to vision specialists for treatment.
 
As of now, the lack of objective vision diagnostic tools creates critical barriers to identifying VSC which delays time-sensitive treatment. VisBox software will be used with OcuTracker, Oculogica’s proprietary eye-tracking hardware platform. VisBox will make it possible to detect and measure three vision disorders related to concussion: convergence insufficiency (CI), the inability for eyes to work together when looking at nearby objects; accommodative insufficiency (AI), the inability to focus or sustain focus at near; and saccadic dysfunction (SD), inability to shift eyes from one point to another for reading and tracking, in a turn-around time of four minutes during the clinical evaluation when a concussion is diagnosed.
 
Phase I of the project has two goals -  generate eye tracking data and the diagnosis of traumatic brain injury (TBI) related vision disorder in 250 pediatric concussion patients and  develop and validate VisBox’s algorithm for accessing the three vision disorders related to concussion - CI, AI, and SD - using hard data from the OcuTracker.