A Novel Portable Platform for Assessing Disorders of the Eye–Brain Connection

Tufts CTSI pilot award given to a team of biomedical engineers at Northeastern University and clinicians at Tufts Medical Center has advanced the development of an improved technology for diagnosing and monitoring disorders that affect the eye–brain connection, such as macular degeneration, glaucoma, multiple sclerosis, and optic neuritis.

 

The device, NeuroVEP, is a portable headset that detects and analyzes visual evoked potentials (VEPs), the electrical signals generated in the brain’s visual cortex in response to visual stimuli. Developed by a team led by Srinivas Sridhar, PhD, Distinguished University Professor of Physics at Northeastern, NeuroVEP addresses an unmet need in neuroophthalmology for a practical alternative to current VEP measurement systems, which are cumbersome and rely on patients’ active participation over 30–45 minutes.

 

Using electric field encephalography—a technique for brain activity monitoring the team developed through earlier DARPA-funded work—NeuroVEP testing can be completed in as little as half the time of conventional EEGbased VEP testing. Tufts CTSI’s pilot award supported initial validation of NeuroVEP.

 

The study was led by neurologists at Tufts Medical Center whose partnership with Dr. Sridhar had previously been facilitated by Tufts CTSI’s Research Collaboration Team. The pilot study’s success helped advance NeuroVEP toward commercialization and has provided the foundation for a 2025 Small Business Innovation Research award from the National Eye Institute (NEI) to evaluate the technology in a larger patient sample.