GCI Seminar Series June 2025: EyeCP: the problem, solution and impact of measuring intracranial pressure non-invasively

Every year in Australia 13 million adults and 3 million children participate in sport, increasing their risk of head injury. A concussion is a mild traumatic brain injury. Although more than 3,000 Australians are hospitalised from sports concussions, most concussed athletes are not hospitalised and may not even seek medical attention. There is currently no tool that can measure brain pressure for sports concussions.

Our solution is a handheld device that uses advanced imaging and analysis of the eye’s blood vessel pulsation to estimate the pressure inside the skull that cushions the brain, known as intracranial pressure (ICP). Our envisaged device aims to minimise the need for invasive procedures, as currently ICP can only be definitively measured in hospital with brain surgery to insert a pressure sensor into the brain or a lumbar puncture.

This talk will discuss how we arrived at the problem, our solution and impact of a device capable of measuring intracranial pressure non-invasively. We will highlight our successful collaboration between biomedical engineering and optometry/ophthalmology, involving clinical partners in critical care and trauma physiology, and industry partners for prototyping.

Dr Bao Nguyen is a clinician-scientist and Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Optometry and Vision Sciences at The University of Melbourne. She previously held a cross-faculty appointment across the Faculty of Medicine Dentistry and Health Sciences and the Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology. Her research focuses on the eye and its connection to the brain in neurological, neurodegenerative and other systemic conditions. She is currently the Project Manager for an interdisciplinary collaborative project aiming to deliver a handheld device to measure brain pressure after a head injury.

A/Prof Sam John is a Biomedical Engineer and leads the Neurobionics Lab in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at The University of Melbourne. He also has honorary appointments at the Royal Melbourne Hospital and the Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health. He has a passion for translation and commercialisation of medical technology from the laboratory to real-world application. Drawing from an extensive background in medical electronics, electrical and electronic engineering, and neuroscience, his primary research involves developing next generation devices that interact with the nervous system, including minimally invasive brain-computer interfaces and endovascular stent-electrodes.