USC ophthalmology resident Rahul Dhodapkar builds smartphone tool to screen for pediatric eye misalignment

For USC ophthalmology resident Rahul Dhodapkar, medicine is a second career. He graduated from Yale University with a bachelor’s degree in computer science in 2015, and worked as an engineer at MongoDB, a large-scale database company. He later returned to Yale for medical school before arriving at USC for his ophthalmology residency. Now he’s combining his backgrounds in software engineering and medicine to develop StrabScan, an AI-powered web app that automates the measurement of pediatric eye misalignment. This February, he was invited to present this research at the 2026 annual meeting of the Association of University Professors of Ophthalmology (AUPO) in San Diego.

Cristy Lytal: Tell me about the research you presented at the AUPO meeting.

Rahul Dhodapkar: Our work is on developing an automated system for measuring ocular misalignment. This is called strabismus. When both eyes are looking together, we can get a bunch of benefits, including depth perception that allows us to navigate the world. For various reasons, especially in children, sometimes the eyes don’t look at the same thing. Oftentimes, we’ll want to track that misalignment and make sure that that’s not interfering with a child’s visual development. The measurement of this is traditionally done manually, using optical prisms and then covering the eyes. That requires a skilled observer to actually perform the measurement. Our system does that measurement by using a smartphone and AI eye tracking, allowing us to do that in a much more accessible way, especially in areas that are resource constrained. And one of the things that I’m really proud of is that we are making this software available and open source to anyone who wants to use it.

Lytal: Is it an app?

Dhodapkar: Yes, it’s a web app, so it doesn’t require you to download anything. It works on any phone or mobile device that has a camera attached to it. We’ve been very careful about designing this from a data privacy perspective. So for this system, everything lives in your own browser, and nothing goes to any external servers. We actually leverage facial biometrics tools, so similar to the technologies that are used to unlock your phone with face ID. It generates some measurements of your face, including your eye position, and then uses that to predict where your eyes are going to be looking.

Lytal: Was AUPO helpful in spreading the word about this technology?

Dhodapkar: Yes, absolutely. I got in touch with several people who are involved in this field as a direct result of the conference and the presentation. Some people reached out to me about wanting to work more on it together, or collaborating and incorporating this technology into what they’re doing. And then we’ll be presenting this work at two more conferences: AAPOS, which is the American Association of Pediatric Ophthalmology and Strabismus, and NANOS, which is the North American Neuro-Ophthalmology Society. These are the two main fields that treat strabismus. I’ll be giving both those talks that are going to happen in March. Hopefully, that’ll get the word out to those folks and anyone else who wants to use it.

Lytal: How did you get involved in this research?

Dhodapkar: This was something that was raised to me by one of the attendings. I thought, this seems to be possible. Let’s build it and see how it works out. And I was lucky enough that a lot of the attendings here at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA) had actually been working on this for several years, collecting patient information and photographs, with the hope that this would one day be possible. So when they brought me on board, we had the data and the IRB in place to make this happen, and then I wrote the software and we built it. [I’ve been working with] Melinda Chang, MD, and Sudna Nallasamy, MD, and Talia Kolin, MD, is the lead person for this project.

Lytal: Tell me a little bit more about your unconventional career path.

Dhodapkar: I used to be an engineer before I went to medical school. I just thought at that time that I wanted to build foundational skills in computer science, and there’s a lot of benefit you can bring with building biomedical systems and devices. But medicine is a field where it’s very difficult to ask the right questions about what you’re going to do unless you are directly involved in patient care. And I felt like I was still fairly young, so I thought let me go ahead and apply to medical school. I went to Yale for medical school, and now I’m here at USC. As a resident, I’m able to straddle these two domains [of medicine and software engineering], where I’m still able to build a lot of things and be creative. I’m lucky that engineering and software is a field that does not require too much monetary investment to do productive things. I’ve been working on several projects related to machine learning and artificial intelligence in a number of fields, including transcriptomics for the retina, image analysis, and oculomics, looking at diabetic retinopathy and glucose data. And I’ve been working on the strabismus project that we presented to the community at AUPO.

Lytal: It’s well-known that residents have a tough schedule. How do you find the time for research?

Dhodapkar: It’s a more than full-time job. So this is nights and weekends, for sure. For me personally, I really love doing research, because I feel like it gives me a lot of purpose and is something I want to continue doing for my career. We’re very lucky at USC to have a lot of people who have experience and expertise in different domains, and who are willing to also share their time and experience to get a lot of these things done. So it’s not just you working in a void. There’s a community here, which cannot be understated, and really does help to make sure that your efforts are well directed.

Lytal: How far are you into your residency, and what’s next?

Dhodapkar: Residency’s four years for ophthalmology. I am halfway through my third year, and I will be applying for fellowships next year to specialize in glaucoma, one of the leading causes of irreversible vision loss in the U.S. and worldwide. My perspective is to try and be useful, and be productive, and try and give back to the community as much as I can. At USC, we do a lot of work at Los Angeles General Medical Center, so being able to care for a lot of patients who maybe otherwise would not get care is very important to me. I always try and incorporate that into my research. I plan eventually to have my own lab, my own research group, to continue answering some of these questions as my career progresses.