# RetiVue WF - A Handheld, High-Resolution, Widefield Retinal Imager

> **NIH NIH R44** · RETIVUE · 2020 · $634,231

## Abstract

Project Summary
Retinopathy of prematurity (ROP) is a treatable eye disease potentially affecting the vision of over 28,000
premature babies born in the US each year. More than 50,000 babies worldwide suffer blindness each year
due to this disease. Screening remains inadequate due to the low number of ophthalmologists trained for this
and a lack of affordable ROP screening equipment for neonatal intensive care units (NICUs). AI driven tele-
medicine based diagnosis and management of ROP could alleviate the burden of manual physician exam and
ensure all infants receive timely screening. However, images from current technology lack sufficient diagnostic
quality and these devices are not easy enough to use to replace expert physicians.
To overcome this hurdle RetiVue L.L.C. has developed the RetiVue WF, the most affordable and easy to use
baby camera that provides the highest resolution, highest image quality, and widest field of view of any porta-
ble device. Our camera can screen the entire eye for ROP in one image making worldwide premature baby
teleROP screening a reality. Beyond that we can identify the 1 in 70 healthy newborns who have undetected
eye disease, including tumors, that can cause them to go blind. With our technology we can finally replace the
inadequate penlight exam to assess newborn baby’s eye health.
Our initial Phase II efforts have resulted in a revolutionary, first commercial version of our device, now being
provided to customers and distributors worldwide. However, while seeing further out and having higher image
quality than any competing device, this early iteration still requires multiple images to capture the entire retina
(3 instead of 10), and requires direct contact with the eye to obtain the widest field of view. A number of tech-
nical obstacles limited our ability to achieve our goal of capturing the entire eye in a one image.
Our proposed Phase IIB workplan will solve these remaining limitations to achieve a single position, non-con-
tact, automatic capture, single image of the entire baby’s retina. These limitations will be overcome by 1) cus-
tom design of a novel 200° widefield non-contact lens appropriately sized for screening the retina edge to edge
on all babies 2) refining our patented multi-beam optical design to increase the number of projector spot beams
from 8 to 48, while narrowing the spot beam size to improve image quality 3) increasing our the camera speed
to capture the multiple retinal images formed by each of these 48 spot beams 4) designing a new lid speculum
to better align the camera with eye and hold eye in place for easy non-contact imaging 5) create a program-
mable camera aperture and improve dehaze algorithms to improve image quality by limiting out of focus haze
6) validating in clinical trials that our device has improved sensitivity and specificity for detecting ROP with re-
spect to both other baby cameras and direct physician exam. We believe this highly disruptive device once
compl...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10081404
- **Project number:** 2R44EY023505-04
- **Recipient organization:** RETIVUE
- **Principal Investigator:** Edward DeHoog
- **Activity code:** R44 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2020
- **Award amount:** $634,231
- **Award type:** 2
- **Project period:** 2013-09-30 → 2022-08-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10081404

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10081404, RetiVue WF - A Handheld, High-Resolution, Widefield Retinal Imager (2R44EY023505-04). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-24 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10081404. Licensed CC0.

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