A new device for early diagnosis of degenerative eye disorders

Christophe Moser and Laura Kowalczuk with the 'Cellularis' prototype which allows to see the pigmentary epithelium © 2022 Alain Herzog - Researchers at an EPFL lab have developed an ophthalmological device that can be used to diagnose some degenerative eye disorders long before the onset of the first symptoms. In early clinical trials, the prototype was shown to produce images with a sufficient degree of precision in just five seconds. Research into treatments to stop or limit the progression of degenerative eye disorders that can lead to blindness is moving ahead apace. But, at present, there is no device that can reliably diagnose these conditions before the first symptoms appear. These disorders, the best-known of which is age-related macular degeneration (AMD), involve changes to the eye's photoreceptors. And they all have the same root cause: the deterioration of the retinal pigmentary epithelium (RPE), a layer of cells that sits behind the photoreceptors. The device developed at EPFL's Laboratory of Applied Photonics Devices (LAPD) observes changes in the RPE before the onset of symptoms, providing researchers with the first-ever in vivo images in which cells can be differentiated.