New Ways to Look Inside Eyes: Making It Easier for Doctors-in-Training

What is it about?

What's this about? Doctors need to look inside your eyes to check if they're healthy. For a long time, they used a tool called a direct ophthalmoscope. It's like a special flashlight, but it's hard to use. Now, there are new ways to do this that might be easier and better. What did the researchers do? They looked at lots of studies about three new ways to teach doctors how to examine eyes: Practice models that don't track how the doctor moves the tool Practice models that do track the doctor's movements Using smartphones to look inside eyes What did they find out? Practice models (without tracking) and smartphones were better for learning than the old way of practicing on real people's eyes. Surprisingly, the practice models that tracked movement weren't any better than the old way. Smartphones seem to be really good for learning because: You can see the back of the eye on the screen right away Teachers can give advice instantly It's more comfortable to use You can save pictures and videos to look at later or show to other doctors Why is this important? Using smartphones to look inside eyes could change how new doctors learn this skill. It's easier, more comfortable, and lets you save what you see. This could be really helpful for patients too, as their eye pictures could be saved in their medical records. But... Since using smartphones for this is still pretty new, it's important to keep teaching the old way too, just in case.

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Photo by Harpreet Singh on Unsplash

Photo by Harpreet Singh on Unsplash

Why is it important?

For non-specialists, there is no easy way to visualise the back of the eye.

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