Two decades of research on the wiring of eye movements

The method did not start in a courtroom. It started in a VA lab, on Parkinson’s, movement disorders, and then TBI.

George Gitchel, Ph.D., is a biomedical engineer. His research at the Hunter Holmes McGuire VA Medical Center in Richmond, and at Virginia Commonwealth University, mapped how eye movements go wrong across more than thirty neurologic conditions — with accuracy that, on the published batteries, exceeds a specialist clinician’s bedside differential.

The same physiology that makes eye movements a window into Parkinson’s disease makes them a window into TBI. The circuits are deep, measurable, and largely outside a witness’s script.

Recognition that actually means something

VCU named him Inventor of the Year in 2019 for the noninvasive eye-tracking system developed with colleagues including Dr. Paul Wetzel and Dr. Mark Baron. The FDA granted Breakthrough Device designation to the RightEye Vision System. In 2022 the Federal Laboratory Consortium gave the work its Impact Award — the first time in FLC’s 40-plus-year history that a Department of Veterans Affairs laboratory received that honor.

Those are not brochure decorations. They are how you explain to a judge why this is not junk science.