"Okay, ready? Just look straight ahead. can you see that little green spot? Okay, look right at the green spot." Fwoosh. The whole world goes bright white and then quickly black. I am in the Alameda County Medical Center Diabetes Clinic at Highland General Hospital in Oakland, my chin resting on a cradle and my face against what looks like an old-fashioned film projector with a digital camera mounted on the back end.

Moments later I am sitting next to Berkeley informatics researcher Jorge Cuadros looking at a digital image of the back of my eyeball.

"This is a healthy eye," he says. "The optic nerve is nice and rosy, the background color is nice and even, there is a nice sheen," he pauses. "It does look like you've been out in the sun a little bit."

Cuadros can tell a lot with this photo. He can tell if I have hyper-tension, certain cancers, or complications from diabetes-and he can tell all this from a computer hundreds of miles away from the patient. Cuadros' project, called EyePACS (Eye Picture Archive Communication System), is a Web-based system that allows people with limited access to health care to get diagnoses on the Web from an eye clinician across the state.

The main focus of EyePACS is identifying complications from diabetes, the leading cause of blindness in the U.S. for people 20 to 74 years old. Every year in America, the equivalent of Berkeley's entire student body, faculty, and staff go blind from preventable diabetes complications.

In many cases, says Cuadros, these people are poor rural workers who don't have access to regular eye exams. "The whole reason why I got into telemedicine is because my own patients were falling through the cracks," he says.

EyePACS focuses primarily on Central Valley indigent populations, where diabetes is common. During checkups at small local clinics, technicians take photos with the same device used at the Oakland clinic. They then put the images on the Web where Cua-dros examines them or sends them to other specialists for opinions. Occasionally, the photos show other problems, such as too much pressure inside the eye, known as glaucoma. In one recent case, careful inspection of a patient's eye revealed a brain tumor in time to save his life.

Cuadros isn't the only Berkeley researcher working on long-distance eye exams. Eric Brewer, a computer science professor and co-founder of a dot-com era search engine, uses his technology expertise to bring telemedicine to rural India. But instead of online photos, Brewer sets up networks where patients can talk to eye doctors by Webcam. The problem is that quality Internet service in rural India is hard to find. So Brewer stretches WiFi technology so rural clinics can connect to hospitals as far as 36 miles away and still get a signal.

Although the technology - Webcams and WiFi -- may not be new, both Cuadros and Brewer use it in a new way to bring healthcare to those who need it most. "Our mission is actually any kind of quality-of-life improvement through the use of novel technology," Brewer says. "I think this is a new area for computer science and I want to see how far we can push it."