BIOE 500 Fall 2025 - Dr. Xincheng Yao

Advancing Portable Widefield Fundus Cameras for Teleophthalmology and Decentralized Eye Care

Abstract: Fundus photography is an indispensable tool for eye disease screening and management. Conventional fundus cameras are limited by restricted field of view, bulky design, and the frequent need for pharmacologic dilation. Our laboratory has pursued innovative strategies to address these limitations and develop portable, widefield retinal imaging technologies, with the goal of enabling affordable and accessible screening, progression monitoring, and post-treatment management in decentralized care settings. By introducing alternative illumination methods, including miniaturized indirect, trans-pars-planar, and trans-palpebral illumination, we have created compact devices capable of capturing widefield (>100°) and ultra-widefield (>200°) retinal and choroidal images without dilation. These innovations have also enabled the development of low-cost, high dynamic range (HDR) fundus cameras and multispectral platforms for depth-resolved chorioretinal imaging. More recently, we have integrated widefield fundus cameras with complementary modalities such as ultrasound, investigated spectral efficiency for AI-assisted disease classification, and demonstrated transcranial illumination for contrast agent-free choroidal imaging. Together, these efforts highlight a translational pipeline from engineering innovation to clinical application, with the aim of making advanced retinal imaging more accessible, affordable, and impactful in teleophthalmology and global eye care.

Biography: Xincheng Yao, PhD, is a Professor and the Richard & Loan Hill Endowed Chair in Biomedical Engineering and Ophthalmology & Visual Sciences at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC), and a Fellow of SPIE, Optica, and AIMBE. He received his PhD in Optics from the Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2001, followed by postdoctoral research in the Biophysics Group at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) from 2001 to 2004. He then served as a Technical Staff Member at LANL (2004–2006) and as a Senior Research Scientist at CFD Research Corporation (2006–2007). In 2007, he joined the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) as a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering, received the NSF CAREER Award in 2011, and was promoted to tenured Associate Professor in 2012. In 2014, he joined UIC as Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Ophthalmology & Visual Sciences, was appointed Richard & Loan Hill Endowed Professor in 2016, named a University Scholar in 2018, and promoted to Richard & Loan Hill Endowed Chair in 2023. Dr. Yao’s research interests include optical instrumentation, ultra-widefield fundus photography, functional optical coherence tomography (OCT), OCT angiography, super-resolution ophthalmoscopy, and machine learning for medical image analysis and disease classification. His research has been supported by the NIH, NSF, DOD, Dana Foundation, Eyesight Foundation, and Chicago Biomedical Consortium, among others. He has authored more than 100 peer-reviewed publications and delivered numerous invited talks and seminars at conferences, universities, and research institutes worldwide. He has also served as Director of the Instrument and Animal Facility Cores at the UIC Lions of Illinois Eye Research Institute and is currently an Associate Editor of Biomedical Optics Express and a Review Editor of Experimental Biology and Medicine.