News
May, 2023
Rossi Lab finds new home
We are excited to announce the move of our lab into the new UPMC Mercy Pavilion in Pittsburgh’s Uptown neighborhood.
This 10-story building is now the home of the UPMC Vision Institute and the UPMC Rehabilitation Institute. It is a first-of-its-kind facility in the United States, combining expert clinical care and groundbreaking research in vision medicine and rehabilitation medicine. With more than 100,000 square feet of research space, the building focuses on translational science – taking what is learned in the lab and applying it directly to clinical care.
Mercy Pavilion includes eight eye disease operating rooms, 83 eye exam rooms, 10 rehab exam rooms, a retail pharmacy, and facilities for many specialized services. This building also houses a life skills apartment and street simulation lab for patients to practice crucial life skills. Patients will have access to a state-of-the-art rehabilitation gym, gathering spaces for community education, and art installations designed to engage multiple senses. A rooftop garden offers a safe space for patients to practice navigating ramps, stairs, and varied surfaces.
The building’s patient-centered, easy-to-navigate design brings together in new ways our world-renowned doctors with the patients who need them most. Rossi Lab will start scheduling research patients at the new space in the summer of 2023.
October 29th, 2022
Vision Walk : Pittsburgh Chapter
Dr Rossi along with Dr Ian Conner were the medical co-chairs for this year's 15th annual Vision Walk. A yearly event sponsored by the Foundation Fighting Blindness Pittsburgh chapter, held at the Great Lawn in Pittsburgh's North Side. The Foundation’s goal is to drive the research that will lead to preventions, treatments, and vision restoration for the spectrum of degenerative retinal diseases, specifically macular degeneration – including age related macular degeneration, retinitis pigmentosa, Usher syndrome, Stargardt disease and Leber congenital amaurosis (LCA). Together these conditions affect more than 10 million Americans and millions more throughout the world. During its now 50-year history, the Foundation has raised over $856 million in support of its effort to reverse blindness and restore vision. To learn more about the foundation please visit :https://www.fightingblindness.org
NVIDIA Hardware Grant Received Spring 2022
Rossi Lab staff members Min Zhang and Daniel Lee recently demonstrated a clear understanding of how to use NVIDIA technology (RTX A5000 GPU) to accelerate the labs research and significantly impact the success of many AI, data science, and imaging registration projects on the horizon.
February 2022
Rossi Lab in conjunction with the UPMC Concussion group is first to precisely evaluate fixational eye movements in patients following concussion. Recent results published in Journal of Vision featured in the US Department of Defense (DoD) Blast Injury Research Coordinating Office Research Highlights, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Inside UPMC.
October 13-15, 2021 Pittsburgh, PA
i2Eye 2021: Fourth Annual Autumn Course on Innovative Imaging in Eye Disease
Recordings of the talks can be found here.
Summer 2021
Fight for Sight/American Macular Degeneration Foundation 2021 Summer Student Fellowship Awarded to Terrence Ahlin
Terrence is a second-year medical student at Lake Erie College of Osteopathic Medicine (LECOM). With support from these organizations, Terrence will be able to complete a project entitled An Improved Detection Scheme for Fluorescence Adaptive Ophthalmoscopy to Enable Quantification of Retinal Pigmented Epithelium Structure and Spectral Fluorescence in Aging and Age-Related Macular Degeneration.
Spring 2021
Manuscript "Strip-based digital image registration for distortion minimization and robust eye motion measurement from scanned ophthalmic imaging systems." has recently been accepted by Biomedical Optics Express. The corresponding source code will be released on our website soon.
October 12 - 14, 2020 E-meeting I2EYE 2020
Innovative Imaging of Eye disease
The third Autumn course on Innovative Imaging in Eye Disease, scheduled as an online conference, October 12-14, 2020. This year, we expanded the multidisciplinarity through sessions mixing physicists, biologists and ophthalmologists around specific medical issues related to ocular imaging. This is a unique opportunity to combine fields of knowledge for a better understanding of diseases and ultimately for better clinical care. Similar to the speakers, the audience is expected to be a mix of physicists, biologists and ophthalmologists. Details of the talks can be found here.
January 02, 2020
We were very pleased to have Pavan Tiruveedhula and his family visit us in Pittsburgh shortly after the new year. Pavan's software and hardware innovations for AOSLO and TSLO have been instrumental for our laboratory and it was truly an honor to welcome him to Pittsburgh.
October 16, 2019
Dr Rossi and staff presents their first Lunch and Learn funded by the WordOut grant they received in conjunction with the JCC AgeWell division. Three lunch and learn sessions will be held between now and the Spring of 2020- helping to inform and educate the community about vision research and the techniques/studies being used in Rossi Lab and within UPMC.
August 1, 2019 University of Pittsburgh
HHMI (Howard Hughes Medical Institute) Summer Fellowship 2019 Mentor Presentations
By receiving the HHMI Fellowship, Grace Eddy was able to continue her data analysis in Rossi Lab this summer and presented her findings on Thursday August 1, 2019. Grace gave a wonderful presentation on AMD phenotypic data in correlation with DNA results.
April 27 - May 2, 2019 Vancouver, Canada
Rossi Lab attended 2019 ARVO annual meeting
Kari Vienola presented "Visualizing near-infrared autofluorescence from retinal pigment epithetical cells in age-related macular degeneration using multi-wavelength excitation" at the Imaging the Eye conference.
New postdoc, Elena Gofas-Salas presented "Investigating retinal disease with in vivo near infrared autofluorescence adaptive optics imaging of retinal pigment epithelium" at the ARVO annual meeting.
Bianca Leonard gave an oral presentation about her ongoing work with TSLO as, "Fixational eye movements (FEMs) following concussion." at the ARVO annual meeting as well.
Spring 2019
Rossi Lab welcomes three undergrad students for the Spring 2019 semester
Hope Reecher ('21) , Bharadwaj Chirravuri ('22) , & Emory Verstraete ('21) will be working on data analysis and image processing for the study"Tracking Recovery from Concussion by Monitoring Retinal Fixational Eye Motion with TSLO." The students will simultaneously learn key concepts of vison science, while gaining basic research skills. We look forward to their contributions and involvement with our lab over the next couple months.
October 25th, 2018 University of Pittsburgh Brain Day
This years event showcased over 100 posters in two sessions, Bianca presented her ongoing work with TSLO as, "Fixational eye movements (FEMs) following concussion." Experts, including Dr. Rossi, discussed the neuroscience of sight in the Brain Day Keynote Panel "From Vision to Vision Restoration." Brain Day helps to educate advocacy groups and individuals about the ongoing research at Pitt and provides them with an opportunity to interact with experts in the field. Furthermore, it helps explore ways to advance brain research with key collaborations and cutting edge technology.
October 8-9th 2018 Paris, France
Autumn Course on Adaptive Optics Imaging, Quinze-Vingts Hospital & Institut Langevin Paris, France
Dr Rossi attended and presented at this event on Ganglion Cells and RPE imaging.
September 21st, 2018 CMU Pittsburgh, PA
Rossi Lab attended CMU's Forum on Biomedical Engineering where about 300 participants attended the Forum, from CMU, University of Pittsburgh, and 21 other institutions. The forum consisted of keynote and plenary talks, plenary panel discussions, and close to 100 poster presentations in the frontiers of biomedical engineering by authors from 33 institutions.
January 11th, 2018
Austin Roorda PhD, University of California Berkeley visits Rossi Lab.
November 13th, 2017
Co-Founders Dr. Christy Sheehy and Dr. Zack Helft of C.Light Technologies came to set up the TSLO system.
October 18 -22, 2017 San Bernardino, CA
CFAO Fall Retreat Vision Science Workshop
The Center for Adaptive Optics (CfAO) Fall Science Retreat provides a forum for researchers in the adaptive optics field to share current results and plan future collaborations.
There were four topical workshops dedicated to active research areas. The fall retreat will continue to host education, outreach, and professional development programs for young researchers in the field.
August 24th, 2017
Pirates vs LA Dodgers : Lab outing
August 21st, 2017
The solar eclipse of August 21, 2017, dubbed "The Great American Eclipse" by the media, was a total solar eclipse visible within a band that spanned the entire contiguous United States, passing from the Pacific to the Atlantic coasts. Rossi lab made their own pinhole projector to take part in the viewing.