Handheld Retinal Measurements to Assess Early Brain Growth

Farrah Mateen of Massachusetts General Hospital in the U.S. will measure the thickness of the retina in children from Zimbabwe over the first five years of life using a handheld optical coherence tomography device to determine whether they can identify abnormal brain development in low-income settings. Optical coherence tomography is noninvasive and should be easy for community health workers to use. They will recruit 300 children and correlate retinal layer thicknesses with parameters including weight, height, and gestational age at birth, as well as HIV status. In parallel, the correlation between retinal thickness and cortical volume will be measured using volumetric MRI and optical coherence tomography on 25 children from the U.S.