TOPIC

Two medical applications will be discussed.

The first application, named Bambi, is basically complete except for annual maintenance and can be seen at www.Bio-Optics.com. Bambi is used for evaluating the health of the cornea and diagnosing eye disease. Bambi captures video images of a monolayer of cells of the cornea of the eye from special corneal microscopes, enhances the image if desired, and allows morphometric parameters (number of cells/mm2, variation of cell sizes, etc.) of the image to be determined. These parameters are used to evaluate the health of the cornea prior to corneal transplantation, eye surgery, or the treatment for corneal disease. Turbo Pascal 1.0 enabled the birth of Bambi while Delphi 4.0 has allowed the mature Bambi to do be able to do fully automated cell analysis.

The second application is currently being developed as a possible method for the evaluation of images in a potential new treatment to cure diabetes. This method involves working with microscope images of red objects of various sizes on a background of variable color containing various other colored objects that are not of interest. The number, sizes, and shapes of the red objects of interest for any image is to be determined and the statistical parameters of these red objects from many associated images needs to be calculated and displayed in a spread sheet.

PRESENTER

Ron graduated from Reed College in physics, got his Ph.D. in physics from Rice University, then spent several years in Boston as Research Professor of Ophthalmology and Director of Ophthalmic Biomedical Engineering at Boston University School of Medicine. While there doing eye research, he founded Bio-Optics, Inc. to manufacture and sell an instrument he invented that obtains images of the cornea. He moved the company to Portland about four years ago after giving up his academic position in Boston.