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  • Ray Hidayat. Photo from http://www.lincoln.ac.nz/
  • ASIAN INNOVATION AWARDS: THE WINNERS 2004: SILVER AWARD

    Colourful Diagnosis

    An eye test that used to take an hour now takes minutes, thanks to a New Zealand team--and a teenage prodigy

    • AT THE AGE OF FIVE , Ray Hidayat fell in love with mathematics. At age 11 he got an A+ in Computing 101 during a semester at Lincoln University in New Zealand's South Island. And at 14 he developed a computer program for a project led by his father, Dr. Rudy Hidajat, which has won the Silver in this year's Asian Innovation Awards.

      The innovation is a quick method of administering the Farnsworth-Munsell (FM) 100-hue colour-vision test--a highly sensitive way of detecting eyesight problems that can indicate the early stage of optic-nerve diseases, glaucoma, diabetes, drug toxicity and tumours, among other conditions.

      Colour-vision defects develop much earlier than those in visual acuity or visual field. Combined with other tests, FM can "help ophthalmologists make correct diagnoses" and catch diseases in their more treatable stage, says Hidajat, an Indonesian-born scientist at Christchurch Hospital's ophthalmology department.

      But despite being valued worldwide by ophthalmologists, "FM is underused because of the time taken to administer it and because it is difficult to interpret the results," explains Hidajat, 60, who has New Zealand degrees in biochemistry and microbiology and a doctorate in genetic transformation. His idea was to cut the time down by computerizing the process. The result: The test now takes four minutes instead of an hour.

      TWO-MINUTE TRIUMPH
      To get the computer program written, Hidajat turned to his son after a colleague with a doctorate in computing had declared himself stumped. At the time, Ray was looking for a project for his school programming competition. He took all of two minutes to come up with an idea, his father says, and wrote the manual for the software in the week of Christmas 2002.

      The FM test asks a patient to arrange 85 coin-sized coloured caps in order. The number and types of errors tell how much the patient's colour vision has deteriorated. Recording the errors manually by turning over each cap and reading its number is laborious and not foolproof.

    • Ray's program records and weights the errors statistically, adjusting for age (people see colours differently as they age) and presents the data on a polar graph--which shows deviations from the centre of a circle--familiar to ophthalmologists everywhere. The program is in computer language developed by New Zealand's largest software company, Jade.

      Christchurch Hospital ophthalmic technician Jan McLay suggested using bar codes on the coloured caps and worked out how to align them so that they could be read by a commercial bar-code scanner.

      The system's simplicity should make it usable on a personal computer by opticians and optometrists, who can then alert ophthalmologists to potential problems. Now, patients often reach ophthalmologists long after the first symptoms could have been detected by the FM test, making treatment more difficult and less likely to succeed. Christchurch Hospital has used the system for a year. In one notable success last year, the four-minute FM test led to the diagnosis of an optic-nerve tumour causing depression and migraine in a young woman. She recovered after surgery.

      In June, Hidajat's team won the New Zealand health-innovation award given by the Ministry of Health. In early October, a paper on the project by Hidajat and his team was accepted for publication by the internationally peer-reviewed journal Documenta Ophthalmologica.

      The Munsell Color Company, the Baltimore-based maker of the FM test, has inquired about marketing the system. And a number of foreign companies have expressed interest in it. Proceeds from commercializing the system would go to a research fund for Hidajat's unit at Christchurch Hospital, which has applied for a patent on the system. Ray Hidayat (whose father changed the spelling of his surname so that New Zealanders would pronounce it correctly) holds the copyright to the computer program he devised. Now 16, he's about to graduate with a bachelor's degree in commerce and management and go on to an honours course in applied computing. His father, meanwhile, is just completing a study on the relationship of colour vision to shortsightedness.






    • Extracted from an article by Colin James/WELLINGTON FEER Issue cover-dated October 21, 2004