There’s a very common tendency among people to take pride in any person from our community who “makes it big” in the world. If a local kid creates a new invention or strikes it rich in show business or the world of politics, whatever, we take pride in their accomplishments. It really doesn’t even have to be just our community, it can be anyone from Wisconsin. We like to claim them as one of us.
So you can imagine how some local people felt when they read, in the Jan. 28 edition of Newsweek, a story with this headline: “Exclusive: Why Next Year’s Super Bowl Could Be Much Safer.” When we got to the fifth paragraph, a name jumped off the page in this sentence: “A New York University neurosurgeon, Uzma Samadani, seems to have discovered a new way to track minute eye movements and correlate those results to brain injuries such as concussions.”
Wait a minute! Uzma Samadani was one of my students at Wayland! Now she’s a neurosurgeon. She’s submitted four patents and she has two pending scientific papers on her research on this new invention for detecting concussions!
The Newsweek article said even with all of today’s medical technology and all the money being poured into brain-injury research, there is no sure-fire, verifiable way to know if a woozy player has a concussion. It goes on to say that that’s about to change because of Uzma’s work fusing neuroscience, math and technology.
Uzma has started a company called Oculogica, which will develop and commercialize her invention, EyeBoxCNS, a device that can be used for visual tracking to determine the extent of head injuries. Now, I’m getting into some technological stuff I don’t understand here, so forgive me if I get it wrong. Newsweek reported that Uzma’s team “set up a camera facing patients to track eye movements 500 times per second while the patients watched a TV screen. She worked with NYU’s math department to write algorithms that could sort out each eye’s movement independently and compare the two sets of data.”
The Newsweek article goes on to say: “The goal was to tally how well the patient focused on the TV screen. The surprise from the data was something different: In every patient, the level and type of brain injury correlated to a set of metrics that showed how well the two eyes moved in lock-step. The more injured the brain, the more such micro-movements of the eyes were out of sync. The differences between the movements of the two eyes is too minuscule for any doctor to observe. But the technology could see it.”
Uzma admitted that, as with so many scientific breakthroughs, her invention happened by accident. As part of her work at NYU, she wanted to discover a way to measure brain damage in people who had incurred head injuries that were so serious that the victims could not follow the simple instructions usually given to diagnose a concussion. So Uzma and her colleagues decided to experiment with TV. Typically, brain-injured people have a hard time watching TV. Newsweek quoted Samadani as saying, “We thought, if we can quantify how well they can watch TV, we might have an outcome we can measure.”
From Newsweek again: “On February 10, 2012, Samadani was sifting through the data from her tests and had her epiphany. ‘I almost fainted,’ she says. ‘I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t sleep for the next two months thinking maybe I was wrong.’”
It appears she wasn’t wrong, and her work is looking very promising. There’s a lot of excitement that EyeBoxCNS can be built into small, inexpensive devices that every team could have in the locker room. There’s even a chance that it may end up as a Smartphone app, which would allow coaches or team doctors to conduct accurate sideline concussion scans anytime a player got his bell rung.
Even though I’ve been concentrating on the importance of her discovery in relation to sports injuries, there are millions of other people who suffer head injuries in automobile accidents and falls who could also benefit from the technology. Until now, concussions have been medically invisible. They don’t show up on MRIs, so their diagnoses have been by a doctor’s subjective judgment. This could be an amazing breakthrough.
Dr. Uzma Samadani: local girl makes good!
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