David Hunter, MD, PhD, ophthalmologist-in-chief at Boston Children’s Hospital, is also developer of StrabisPix and BabySee. The Pediatric Vision Scanner received FDA marketing clearance last month.

As a pediatric ophthalmologist, I do my best to assure that every young patient I examine will have a lifetime of perfect sight. The condition that I battle most commonly is amblyopia, or “lazy eye,” in which the eye is healthy but does not develop vision — simply because the brain doesn’t receive proper input when a child’s visual system is “learning” how to see.

When I can diagnose amblyopia early enough, I can treat it with an eye patch or eye drops to block the “good” eye, giving the eye with amblyopia time to catch up. But amblyopia does not fight fairly: about half of affected kids have no visible signs of the condition. As a result, amblyopia silently steals the sight of hundreds of thousands of children — many of whom will never get their vision back because treatment started too late.

It is this problem that inspired me to develop the Pediatric Vision Scanner (PVS). …