The Use of Retinal Scans to predict health conditions in pregnancy & fertility: A conversation with Dr. Li, Part I

 In today's episode, I'll share some research conducted by doctors in Singapore that gives you a sense of how close we are to using non invasive scans to predict conditions in pregnancy and fertility before clinical symptoms arise.What these research physicians are doing is making use of a retinal scan--taking pictures of the tiny vessels at the back of your eye and measuring changes in these vessels to predict a number of significant issues in fertility and pregnancy. Through the lucky marriage of improvements in imaging tech and the harvesting and analysis of big data scientists have birthed a field, maybe yet to be fully named, but what I saw called oculomics--(sounds a little too much like a bond villian) which is using biomarkers from pictures of the eye to predict systemic disease. What makes this particularly useful is that often issues show up in the microvasculature, these tiny vessels, before it shows up in more obvious clinical symptoms, giving us something like an advance warning, and potentially time to react.Dr. Li's 2024 paper: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8677435/