Digital image acquisition for ophthalmoscope

The aim of this work is to provide a Panoptic™ ophthalmoscope with digital data acquisition. In fact, most ophthalmoscopes used in daily clinical practice do not contain the data recording ability. Therefore, the main advantages of a digital ophthalmoscope are, among others, better quality data sharing, the possibility of exam´s reassessment and improved medical teaching. Once the challenge was presented by clinical staff working at Coimbra University Hospital, several prototype´s technical drawings were idealized in AutoCAD^® 2011 environment at Blueworks, and a number of experiments in optics laboratory at Institute of Biomedical Research in Light and Image (IBILI) were accomplished as well. In the end, the prototype developed contains a camera inside and it fits into the ophthalmoscope. In order to verify its capacity to record retinal images and to detect ocular fundus pathologies, the prototype has been clinically tested and its impact in medical community has been markedly positive.