Thousands Of Blind People Attacked Every Day, UK

A survey published by national charity Action for Blind People has revealed that 1.2 million blind and partially sighted people in the UK have experienced physical and/or verbal abuse:

– In one day nearly 20,000 (4%) blind and partially sighted people were physically abused, compared to less than 1% of sighted people.

– In one week almost 180,000 (16%) blind and partially sighted people were verbally abused, compared to only 7% of sighted people.

Denise Jarrett, registered blind is currently being supported by Action and will be re-housed this month, as a result of abuse and harassment she has received from local youths in her neighbourhood. She said: “I have had bricks and stones thrown at me, a football kicked at my face, eggs thrown at my window and kids spitting at me. I cannot wait to get away from this abuse and live in an area where I can feel safe. Thanks to Action for Blind People I will feel confident again and will be able to get on with my life peacefully.”

The survey also revealed that a visually impaired person is three times more likely than a sighted person (24% v 8%) not to know where or who to turn to, and almost twice as likely not to be taken seriously (31% v 17%) if they told anyone about their experiences.

Stephen Remington, Chief Executive at Action for Blind People, said: “Unfortunately visually impaired people can be seen as vulnerable and an easy target for anti-social behaviour. The impact this can have on a visually impaired person, who may already feel vulnerable can be devastating, perhaps even more so than for a sighted person. Many people in society will be as horrified by these results as we are. All of us; parents, teachers, employers, neighbours and even passers-by can play a role in helping to combat such disgusting behaviour.”

Action for Blind People is raising awareness of the unacceptable levels of verbal and physical abuse towards visually impaired people and would like to work with more police, schools and employers to address the problem. Action offers visual awareness training tailored to help gain a greater understanding of the disability and the every day issues faced by visually impaired people.

Bromley Borough Police Community Officers have already received visual awareness training from Action. Martin Hills, Partnership Inspector at Bromley Police, comments: “Bromley Police is committed to helping staff improve their knowledge and understanding of the issues affecting those people in the local community with disabilities. As part of this commitment, we arranged for Action for Blind People to deliver Visual Awareness training to over 50 of our local Safer Neighbourhood officers. The training was extremely well received by our officers and found to be very useful. We are now more aware of the issues faced by visually impaired people and feel a lot more confident in approaching people with a visual impairment and understanding their needs.”

If you or anyone you know is experiencing verbal and/or physical abuse please contact Action for Blind People on our National Freephone Helpline 0800 915 4666 or visit Action’s website at actionforblindpeople for information and support.

–Action for Blind People compiled the survey with Tickbox, a leading market research organisation.

– The summary of findings is downloadable from Action’s website actionforblindpeople . The statistical report is available on request from Debbie Flatley on 020 7635 4921.

– Visual Awareness training provides you with an understanding of visual
impairment and the challenges faced by a visually impaired person

– Action for Blind People is an expert national organisation, ensuring blind and partially sighted people get practical support in all aspects of their lives. Contact Action for Blind People’s National Freephone Helpline on 0800 915 4666 or actionforblindpeople

– Action for Blind People is breaking down barriers that prevent visually impaired people from achieving the same opportunities as sighted people.

Action for Blind People is an expert national organisation, ensuring blind and partially sighted people get practical support in all aspects of their lives.

actionforblindpeople

2007 Alfred W. Bressler Prize In Vision Science Won By Optical Scientist For Groundbreaking Research And Understanding And Improvement Of Vision

David R. Williams, William G. Allyn Professor of Medical Optics and director of the University of Rochester’s Center for Visual Science, has won the 2007 Alfred W. Bressler Prize in Vision Science, awarded each year by the Jewish Guild for the Blind.

Williams is being recognized for his extensive and groundbreaking research on the mechanisms of human vision. He accepted the award and the $37,500 prize at a ceremony this weekend in New York City.

Williams and colleagues have developed a camera that incorporates “adaptive optics” to see inside the human eye more clearly than ever before. The camera can take pictures of structures as small as single cells at the back of the living eye.

A key to the camera is a precision device known as a deformable mirror, equipped with 140 tiny computer-controlled pistons arranged on the back surface of a 4 mm square mirror. These pistons push and pull ever so slightly on the mirror to correct the particular pattern of optical defects in each person’s eye. Williams’s adaptive optics technology is now used at dozens of research laboratories around the world to study blinding diseases such as glaucoma, retinitis pigmentosa, age-related macular degeneration, and diabetic retinopathy.

Not only has the team used adaptive optics to see into the eye, they are also using adaptive optics to allow people to see out into the world more clearly. The technology provides a detailed description of the optical defects in a person’s eye that make possible customized contact lenses and refractive surgery for each particular patient. Bausch & Lomb’s Zyoptix laser system, which provides customized refractive surgery tailored to the needs of each patient, is one technology that has already emerged from Williams’s research.

Williams has appointments in the University’s Departments of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Ophthalmology, Biomedical Engineering, and the Institute of Optics. He has eight patents and has authored more than 100 scientific publications. In addition to many other awards, Williams is a 2003 and 2007 recipient of an R&D Magazine R&D 100 award for the 100 most technologically significant inventions of each of those years. Williams received his doctorate in psychology from the University of California at San Diego.

The Bressler Prize in Vision Science at the Jewish Guild for the Blind was established in 2001, through a bequest of Alfred W. Bressler (1905-1999). Bressler was a New York attorney for more than 70 years, most of that time with the law firm of Moses & Singer. A graduate of the Columbia University School of Law in 1927, Bressler received recognition in1998 when a professorship at Columbia was named in his honor.

Source: Jonathan Sherwood

University of Rochester

Bionic Eye Expected By 2011 In Australia

The first clinical test of an Australian bionic eye is likely to take place within two years and be commercialised within five according to University of Melbourne researchers, thanks to a $50 million funding boost from the Federal Government.

Director of Bionic Vision Australia and Professor of Engineering at the University of Melbourne Dr Anthony Burkitt, welcomed the announcement and says the funding boost will place Australia at the forefront of development in the bionic eye.

“We have the team of experts to compete with anyone in the world,” he says.

It is almost three decades since a team at the University of Melbourne developed the bionic ear, and Dr Burkitt says a similar multidisciplinary approach – using biomedical engineers, clinical experts and neuroscientists from Vision Australia – will have similar success in the development of a retinal implant.

Head of the Macular Research Unit at the Centre for Eye Research Australia, University, Professor Robyn Guymer says the boost in funding will increase chances of delivering a bionic eye with such high resolution that it does more than simply differentiate between shadows and large objects, as current bionic eyes enable.

“We are hopeful that with this funding we could provide a much higher quality of life to people with severe visual loss,” she says.

The bionic eye is one of nine projects to be developed as part of the Government’s response to the 2020 summit, a list which was released by the Prime Minster.

Dr Burkitt says it is pleasing to see the Federal Government has maintained a long-sighted view in these economically uncertain times, and is investing in future technological development which will place Australia at the forefront of development in the bionic eye.

While details of how the $40 million will be spent were not specified in the Government’s statement, Dr Burkitt predicts the next step in the process will be a peer review of the project.

Source:
Emma O’Neill

University of Melbourne

AAO-SOE Joint Meeting Research Highlights

The scientific program of the 2008 Joint Meeting of the American Academy of Ophthalmology (Academy) and European Society of Ophthalmology (SOE) included a clinical study of a promising new treatment for retinopathy of prematurity (ROP).

ROP is often difficult to resolve using current treatments and can result in permanent, severe visual impairment in premature infants when treatment is unsuccessful. ROP encompasses a series of damaging changes in the retina, the area at the back of the eye that relays images to the brain’s visual center. These changes may occur because the retina of a baby born before term has not had time to fully develop. A number of severe visual impairments, including detached retina, glaucoma, cataracts, nearsightedness, and eye misalignment can result from ROP. One abnormal retinal change in ROP is the growth of abnormal blood vessels, which are stimulated by vascular endothelial growth factor, or VEGF. Anti-VEGF medications have been developed to inhibit abnormal vessels and are effective treatments adult eye disorders such as “wet” age-related macular degeneration.

Building on earlier studies that showed good results, Alay S. Banker, MD, and his colleagues, Banker’s Retina Clinic and Laser Centre, Gujarat, India, evaluated anti-VEGF therapy in 21 babies (34 eyes) who had or were at high risk for ROP. Fourteen eyes received laser and then anti-VEGF injections; 12 eyes received anti-VEGF injection only; and six eyes received anti-VEGF, then laser treatment. All babies were examined one day after treatment, weekly for a month, and monthly thereafter. In all babies’ eyes—including those that received anti-VEGF treatment only— the abnormal blood vessels resolved without further treatment, and no adverse results were seen in any eyes or in the babies’ general health status in follow-up exams at about 37 weeks after treatment (mean age: 37.5 weeks).

Dr. Alay said anti-VEGF treatment provided rapid, effective treatment for ROP that avoided the complications and risks of laser and cryotherapy (freezing) vessel treatments, and was simpler and safer to provide to medically fragile babies. As abnormal vessels receded, normal retinal vessels slowly grew in their place. Dr. Alay says that this treatment could be particularly important in developing countries where laser facilities might not be available; also anti-VEGF treatment could “buy time” to transport babies when advanced centers are available. In some cases, further treatment might prove unnecessary.

Larger, randomized clinical trials will be necessary to establish the safety and efficacy of anti-VEGF therapy as a first or subsequent treatment for ROP. Such a study is currently underway in the US.

About the Academy-SOE Joint Meeting

The 2008 Joint Meeting of the American Academy of Ophthalmology (Academy) and European Society of Ophthalmology (SOE), the largest and most comprehensive ophthalmic educational meeting in the world, is in session November 8 to 11 at the Georgia World Congress Center, Atlanta. The offerings include 277 continuing medical education courses, 179 “Breakfast with the Experts” roundtables, 95 skills transfer courses, and more than 100 hours of scientific program presentations, at no charge.

About the American Academy of Ophthalmology

AAO is the world’s largest association of eye physicians and surgeons – Eye M.D.s – with more than 27,000 members worldwide. Eye health care is provided by the three “O’s” – opticians, optometrists and ophthalmologists. It is the ophthalmologist, or Eye M.D., who can treat it all: eye diseases and injuries, and perform eye surgery. To find an Eye M.D. in your area, visit the Academy’s Web site at aao/

Source: Mary Wade

American Academy of Ophthalmology

People Who Wear Glasses Aren’t Geeks

Latest Australian research into myopia or shortsightedness reveals that people who wear glasses are not stereotypical geeks or nerds.

“We have literally busted the myth that people who wear glasses are introverted or have particular personality characteristics. They are more likely to be agreeable and open, rather than closed and introverted,” said A/Prof Paul Baird of the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Eye Research Australia.

Myopia or shortsightedness is a complex eye condition which affects about one in four Australians.

In the word’s biggest study into factors linked to myopia, and utilising the University’s Australian Twin Registry, 633 twins and a comparative group of 278 family members were involved in the study over a four year period.

For the first time in a study into personality and myopia, participants were analysed using a state-of-the-art measure of the five major personality factors (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism), administered by psychologists from the University of Melbourne.

Results revealed that comparison of family members and twins showed no link between myopia and introversion; however there was a significant but small association with myopia and Agreeableness.

“Working together we have been able to generate more comprehensive and consistent results than previously obtained regarding personality and myopia, “said Nick Haslam from the School of Behavioural Science at the University of Melbourne

The results have important social and preventative implications.

“Good eye care is really important but unfortunately there are not always good associations with wearing glasses,” says Baird.

“This shows that people, particularly children, should not avoid or delay wearing glasses due to preconceived ideas about what it would imply about their personalities.”

The personality focus provides a key element in a series of studies to identify factors involved in myopia. The other elements investigated were environmental and genetic factors.

Shortsighted people have difficulty seeing distant objects, making it difficult to engage in everyday activities such as driving and watching television.

The research has been published in the March issue of the international eye journal Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual Science.

Source: Rebecca Scott

University of Melbourne

Medical Study Establishes First-Ever Long-Term Benefits For Macular Degeneration Sufferers Using Macular Health Vitamin Supplement

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), age-related macular degeneration (AMD) ranks third as a cause of visual impairment. It is the primary cause of visual impairment in industrial countries with a blindness prevalence of 8.7 percent. A new medical study indicates, however, that with the use of the Macular Health vitamin supplement there is a way to preserve the vision of millions of aging adults suffering from AMD.

The second phase of the Multifocal Electroretinogram (MERG) study, conducted at the UAB Callahan Eye Foundation Hospital in Birmingham, Alabama, recently revealed that patients suffering from AMD experienced long-term benefits from taking Macular Health, a special combination of supplemental vitamins, minerals and carotenoids. Phase I of the MERG study, completed in 2005, confirmed an average of 16 percent improvement in vision after taking Macular Health for only 12 weeks. Phase II, completed recently, measured the vision function of the same patients two years later and found an average improvement in vision of 17 percent.

Source: Macular Health, LLC

GP Commissioners Can Take Away Cinderella Status Of Eye Health Says Department Of Health Primary Care Lead

Emerging GP Consortia have the chance to get rid of eye health’s “Cinderella Status” in terms of local health priorities, according to Jill Matthews, National Implementation Director for Primary Care Improvement. Speaking on the eve of her presentation at the Local Optical Committee Support Unit’s Training & Development roadshow for Eye Care Professionals in Nottingham, she went on to say,

“Vulnerable groups must be a priority when local health services are commissioned, and that includes eye care. Leaving eye care services as a low priority means that for example the elderly, who are more likely to experience problems of sight loss may not get the easy access they need to early detection and treatment of eye conditions close to home. To ensure high quality accessible eye care for everyone, Commissioners have a real opportunity to utilise the skills and expertise of opticians and optometrists to provide enhanced services in the local community. Eye health is a great example of how GPs will be able to work with other clinicians to commission patient focussed services which address the needs of everyone in need, whilst at the same time making better use of NHS resources.”

The roadshow has been organised as part of a series of LOCSU training roadshows to provide information for the optical profession, especially members of Local Optical Committees on latest changes in the NHS.

Notes

– This roadshow has been organised by the Local Optical Committee Support Unit. The Local Optical Support Unit provides support and expertise to Local Optical Committees across England. LOCSU provides quality, practical support to Local and Regional Optical Committees (LOCs/ROCs) in England and Wales to help them to develop, negotiate and implement local objectives in respect of primary eye care services.

– Jill Matthews has been on secondment to the Department of Health since September 2008. As National Implementation Director of the Primary Care Improvement team, she has made great strides to improve the commissioning of primary care services through the implementation of a national improvement programme, co-produced with SHAs and PCTs to help PCTs address the strategic, leadership and operational challenges in driving up the quality of primary care commissioning. Involved in Primary Care Development at Trent SHA since 2003,

– Jill enjoyed a full and varied career across the NHS. During this time, she was responsible for leading the implementation of the new General Medical Services Contract for General Practitioners and the new regulatory frameworks for Community Pharmacy. Jill was responsible for Out of Hours arrangements across East Midlands and worked closely with PCTs across the region to develop capability in commissioning the complex primary care agenda.

She chaired the National SHA Primary Care Leads Network, working closely with primary care commissioning teams on the development of tools to support the delivery of new primary care initiatives including Practice Based Commissioning and Alternative Provider Medical Services. She represents SHAs, EPS Implementation Reference Groups, the GP Access Reference Group and the Procurement Reference Group.

Source:

Local Optical Committees Support Unit

Physicians Successfully Trained To Perform Cataract Surgery In Rural China

Patients in rural China who received cataract surgery from specially trained non-ophthalmologists had improved vision 10 to 14 months following surgery, according to an article that will appear in the November 2007 print issue of Archives of Ophthalmology. After six months of intensive training, two local physicians who had not previously performed eye surgery operated on 313 patients in 2005. Dennis S. C. Lam, M.B.B.S., M.D., of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and colleagues conducted follow-up examinations with 176 patients. “More than 85 percent of the eyes in this study were blind prior to surgery, and nearly 96 percent had best-corrected visual acuity of 6/18 or better, a visual outcome identified by the World Health Organization as indicative of ‘good’ results for cataract surgery,” the authors write. ‘These results confirm the effectiveness of skill transfer in this setting, with superior outcomes to most studies in rural Asia and to eyes in this cohort operated on at other facilities.’

In a second paper based on the same study, Nathan G. Congdon, M.D., M.P.H., also of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and colleagues determined that although 87 percent (151 of 174 examined patients) of the patients’ vision could be further improved with glasses, only 53 patients (35 percent) accepted prescriptions, with most citing a lack of perceived need. In addition, only 48 percent of patients opted to have surgery on their second eye; most refused because of cost. “Programs to improve service uptake should focus on reading glasses and cost-reduction strategies such as tiered pricing,” the authors conclude.

Arch Ophthalmol. 2007;125(11):(doi:10.1001/archophthalmol.125.11.eeb70013 and 10.1001/archophthalmol.125.11.eeb70014.

JAMA

One Gene 90 Percent Responsible For Making Common Parasite Dangerous

More than a decade of searching for factors that make the common parasite Toxoplasma gondii dangerous to humans has pinned 90 percent of the blame on just one of the parasite’s approximately 6,000 genes.

The finding, reported in Science by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and elsewhere, should make it easier to identify the parasite’s most virulent strains and treat them. The results suggest that when a more harmful strain of T. gondii appears, approximately 90 percent of the time it will have a different form of the virulence gene than that found in the more benign strains of the parasite.

Infection with T. gondii, or toxoplasmosis, is perhaps most familiar to the general public from the widespread recommendation that pregnant women avoid changing cat litter. Cats are commonly infected with the parasite, as are some livestock and wildlife. T. gondii’s most infamous relatives are the parasites that cause malaria.

Epidemiologists estimate that as many as one in every four humans is infected with T. gondii. Infections are typically asymptomatic, only causing serious disease in patients with weakened immune systems. In some rare cases, though, infection in patients with healthy immune systems leads to serious eye or central nervous system disease, or congenital defects or death in the fetuses of pregnant women. Historically, scientists have found strains of T. gondii difficult to tell apart, heightening the mystery of occasional serious infections in healthy people.

“Clinically it may be helpful to be able to test the form of the parasite causing the infection to determine if a case requires aggressive management and treatment or is unlikely to be a cause of serious disease,” says senior author L. David Sibley, Ph.D. professor of molecular microbiology. “This finding will advance us toward that goal.”

ROP18, the T. gondii virulence gene identified by researchers, makes a protein that belongs to a class of signaling factors known as kinases that are ubiquitous in human biology.

“Kinases are active in cancers and autoimmune disorders, so pharmaceutical companies already have libraries of inhibitors they’ve developed to block the activity of these proteins,” Sibley says. “Some patients can’t tolerate the antibiotics we currently use to treat T. gondii infection, so in future studies we will want to screen these inhibitor libraries to see if one can selectively block ROP18 and serve as a more effective treatment.”

The Institute for Genomic Research, in collaboration with the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, completed sequencing of the T. gondii genome in 2004. Three separate postdoctoral fellows (the co-first authors of the paper) then used three different post-genomic techniques to search the genome for potential virulence factors.

“All the approaches we used eventually pointed emphatically to a single gene, ROP18,” Sibley notes. “The readings were just off the scale.”

A survey of isolates from T. gondii strains from around the world found ROP18 and its effects on virulence to be widespread.

“The protein made by the ROP18 gene has an interesting and predictable function,” says Sibley. “The parasite uses it to get a host cell ‘drunk,’ secreting the protein into the host after infection.”

Inside the host cell, ROP18 presumably disrupts some important signaling process, altering the intracellular environment in a way that favors the parasite’s growth and reproduction. Sibley notes that ROP18’s primary role in T. gondii virulence suggests that similar genes in malaria parasites may be worthy of further study.

Sibley and his colleagues are currently working to identify ROP18’s targets in the host cell. They are also looking for other genes that act together with ROP18 to contribute to T. gondii virulence.

“In addition, we plan to use the same genomic approaches that identified ROP18 to seek genes in T. gondii that affect other important characteristics, such as latency and transmissibility,” he says.

Taylor S, Barragan A, Su C, Fux B, Fentress SJ, Tang K, Beatty WL, El Hajj H, Jerome M, Behnke MS, White M, Wootton JC, Sibley LD. A secreted serine-threonine kinase determines virulence in the eukaryotic pathogen Toxoplasma Gondii. Science, December 15, 2006.

Washington University School of Medicine’s full-time and volunteer faculty physicians also are the medical staff of Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Children’s hospitals. The School of Medicine is one of the leading medical research, teaching and patient care institutions in the nation, currently ranked fourth in the nation by U.S. News & World Report. Through its affiliations with Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Children’s hospitals, the School of Medicine is linked to BJC HealthCare.

Contact: Michael C. Purdy

Washington University School of Medicine

Details Of Age-Related Blindness Revealed By 3-D Snapshots Of Eyes

To get a better look at the abnormalities that cause age-related macular degeneration (AMD), the leading cause of vision loss in Americans and Europeans over 50, the research groups of James Fujimoto at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and collaborators Jay Duker of the Tufts University School of Medicine, and Joel Schuman of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine have created ultra-detailed 3-D images of the eyes of more than 2,000 people from different ethnic groups, 400 of whom have AMD. Selected electronic data, published in the special Interactive Science Publishing (ISP) issue of Optics Express, the Optical Society’s (OSA) open-access journal, may pave the way for new diagnostic software useful for developing new treatments.

AMD is a condition in which the macula — the region of highest visual acuity in the retina — stops functioning properly. AMD causes blurred vision and, in advanced cases, a large blind spot in the center of one’s vision.

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) has become a standard tool for assessing AMD and other eye diseases. An OCT instrument shoots beams of infrared light into the retina, where they are reflected to greater or lesser extent by different structures within the eye. By measuring the echoe time delays of reflected light, an ophthalmologist can have a cross-sectional or three dimensional view of the retina’s layers. This high resolution, three dimensional image reveals abnormalities that can be used to track disease progression and response to treatment.

Fujimoto’s team uses an OCT machine with a resolution two times higher than commercial OCTs. In this study, they imaged the retinas of 400 people suffering from different stages of macular degeneration. Their profiles range from a 54-year-old man with mild AMD and 20/20 vision, to a 77-year-old woman with advanced AMD who can just barely count fingers from a distance of four feet. Each person’s eye was scanned in 180 different slices and stitched together to form a 3-D image of the eye.

Most of the patients suffer from “dry” AMD, the milder and more common form of the disease. The hallmark of this condition is drusens, small yellowish clumps that build up between the layers of retina. These masses tend to progress with time, eventually disrupting the structure of the retina.

Ultra-high resolution OCT reveals the detailed structure of these changes with a resolution that enables individual layers of the retina to be visualized. “This would be hard to resolve with the standard resolution of a typical commercially available OCT instrument, which cannot see ultra-thin layers,” says co-author Yueli Chen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Scans of other patients’ eyes show a more advanced “wet” form of AMD, in which abnormal blood vessels grow in between the layers of the retina. 3-D OCT provides a more accurate estimate of the volume of fluids leaked by these faulty vessels, which damages the photoreceptors in the eye and leads to blindness.

The MIT group is publishing the electronic data in these 3-D images in order to make it available to the image processing community to develop computer programs that can quickly and automatically detect the details and severity of the disease — by counting the number of drusens, for example, or quantifying the volume of fluid leaked into the eye by faulty blood vessels. Developing these programs will be difficult because of the sheer quantity of data contained in each data set says Fujimoto — but it is important because quantitative measurements can be used to track disease progression and help establish correlations between the severity of vision loss and changes in the architecture of the eye.

This could provide a faster and more efficient way for drug makers to develop and evaluate new treatments in clinical trials. No treatment currently exists for dry AMD, and treatments for the wet form — including lasers that burn the blood vessels and drugs that inhibit the growth of new vessels — can only slow, not stop, vision loss.

Fujimoto’s research takes advantage of ISP, an initiative undertaken by OSA in partnership with the National Library of Medicine, part of the National Institutes of Health, and with the support of the United States Air Force Office of Scientific Research. This initiative allows scientists to expand upon traditional research results in journal articles by providing software for interactively viewing underlying source data and to objectively compare the performance of different technologies. This data may be related to medical images, such as those taken with X-rays, MRIs, CT scans and ultrasounds, or it may be created in research involving oil and gas exploration, climatology, pollution monitoring and many other fields. Specifically in this instance, researchers are able to look at the actual OCT scans from the study patients as they read the paper. The software was developed in conjunction with Kitware, Inc.

Notes:

Paper: “Three-dimensional ultrahigh resolution optical coherence tomography imaging of age-related macular degeneration,” Yueli Chen et al, Optics Express, Vol. 17 Issue 5, pp.4046-60, March 2, 2009.

About OSA

Uniting more than 70,000 professionals from 134 countries, the Optical Society (OSA) brings together the global optics community through its programs and initiatives. Since 1916 OSA has worked to advance the common interests of the field, providing educational resources to the scientists, engineers and business leaders who work in the field by promoting the science of light and the advanced technologies made possible by optics and photonics. OSA publications, events, technical groups and programs foster optics knowledge and scientific collaboration among all those with an interest in optics and photonics.

About Kitware

Kitware, Inc. is a leader in the creation and support of open-source software and state of art technology across five business areas: visualization, computer vision, medical imaging, data publishing and quality software process. By employing open source business and development models the company fosters extended, collaborative communities and provides flexible, low-cost technical solutions to medical device manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies, government researchers, the oil & gas industry, computer aided design & manufacturing, aerospace, engineering, and educational institutions worldwide.

Founded in 1998, Kitware has grown to include customers in over 43 countries and in 41 of the 50 US states. Kitware’s team is widely recognized for their major contributions to a variety of open source software systems including the cross-platform build system CMake, the Visualization Toolkit (VTK), the Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit (ITK), and the Parallel Visualization System (ParaView).

Source: Colleen Morrison

Optical Society of America