If successful, this task will result in technical approaches that can immediately be incorporated into ongoing operations and research activity including active flight and ground research venues. The techniques and protocols developed have potential to be incorporated in to ongoing operational monitoring of flight crew ocular health. In addition, the collection of ocular images of sufficient data content can allow the testing of multiple research hypotheses using images collected onboard with the enhanced protocols. This will allow better assessment of structural changes and their role in vision syndromes, and ultimately, more thorough understanding of the phenomenon at reduced resource cost. The extension of these techniques to non-ocular images at the cellular/subcellular level will be assessed in the out years by renewal proposals. These approaches will support the use of cellular biosentinels or 3-D culture systems thorough effective analysis of structural and biological assessment at the cellular and sub-cellular level.
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