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Scientists Hack Cellphone To Detect Diseases
Posted by
kdawson
on Sat Dec 20, 2008 06:11 PM
from the blue-blood dept.
from the blue-blood dept.
Dave Bullock (eecue) plugs his piece up at Wired on a cellphone modded into a portable blood tester. This could become a significant piece of medical technology. "A new MacGyver-esque cellphone hack could bring cheap, on-the-spot disease detection to even the most remote villages on the planet. Using only an LED, plastic light filter, and some wires, scientists at UCLA have modded a cellphone into a portable blood tester capable of detecting HIV, malaria, and other illnesses. Blood tests today require either refrigerator-sized machines that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars or a trained technician who manually identifies and counts cells under a microscope. These systems are slow, expensive and require dedicated labs to function. And soon they could be a thing of the past."
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star trek isn't dead yet (Score:5, Funny)
And thus the building blocks of the medical tricorder are laid.
tack on a portal ultrasound, xray , and micro MRI and maybe doctors bills will start to come down.
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I worked on a project like this for General Dynamics. It used laser light to detect biological weapons in the air. I didn't understand precisely how it worked, because I was only responsible for creating the code, but when the laser passes through the air it scatters, and the scatter can be used to identify if it's a chemical weapon, a bioweapon, or just some passing dust.
It sounds like this cellphone works on the same principle, but using an LED instead of a laser.
Re:star trek isn't dead yet (Score:4, Insightful)
Not just the building blocks, but the first of many iterations. The compute power going into cell phones lately is pretty high and it won't be long before you can do much more. Imagine a small suitcase lab powered by a cellphone and a few accessories. It will cost less than those $100 laptops and do much more for poor communities. Imagine your $100 donation every year keeping 1000 in better physical health? Imagine....
With a bit of tech and a sat link, very expensive western doctors can very cheaply be part of the suitcase experiment that allows them to add their knowledge to a database of medical knowledge that builds the code for the first robotic doctor, or online third world doctor.
Software can be written that uses video analysis to identify visible symptoms if there is a picture of the patient when not sick. All that ear/nose/throat simple visual analysis can be done by a computer or a tech with medical computers etc. If a cell phone can do this much already, just wait.
Now, if Bill G were really interested in changing the world's health... perhaps he'd get on-board with this obvious idea. Who knows. He's got a lot of money.
Parent
Re:star trek isn't dead yet (Score:4, Informative)
"Now, if Bill G were really interested in changing the world's health... perhaps he'd get on-board with this obvious idea. Who knows. He's got a lot of money."
For some reason, I was bored and just happen to watch the PowerPoint presentation on this thing last week on TV from Washington University. It was quite an impressive device, with many possibilities for multiple uses as part of the design criteria.
And the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation was a huge contributor.
Parent
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Oh damn, RTFA really is useful? ouch
Now, I think that all we need to do is search through all the ST episodes and movies (especially time travel ones) and see if anyone can spot Bill G anywhere.... hmmmmm or perhaps Melinda G. If Bill has used his money to build a time machine, or probably just got an email from himself telling him what he has to do to live long enough to build a time machine... yes, I like this plot. Can we get a fan site to put the plot out there ?
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Doesn't matter much tough. I saw a medical professor close to tears because of the state of competence and the medical industry.
Main problems:
Doctors don't think "I don't know this (yet)." They think "There will never ever exist a solution to this". This is because of their god complex.
Doctors don't care for the underlying cause. Most of the time, they "fix" your symptoms by giving you drugs. Of course if you don't take them forever, everything goes back to how it was before.
Patients
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Hmm... Slashdot replaces · HTML entities with spaces. :(
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What you've just described is a mutual company. State Farm Auto Insurance works in this very way, as in I get a check at the end of the year if they took in more then they paid out in claims. Personally, I think healthcare should be universal. People claim it doesn't work and is quite expensive. It doesn't work and is expensive if you don't have the right processes and systems in place. Otherwise, it can be a very efficient system serving the citizens of whatever country it's in.
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>>>come to europe, where we have healthcare for all.
You don't actually believe that healthcare is free, do you? You're still paying the hospital & doctor bills, same as we Americans do, but the bill is applied directly to your paycheck. So you're paying the same amount as we are, it's just a hidden bill.
Worse, you have no choice because it's a monopoly where all hospitals are run by the government (yes even the private ones which are strictly regulated by the politicians). That situation is
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maybe you shouldn't assume where I live. also, please don't assume words inbetween my words. I never talked of free, and never implied I lived in the UK.
but, seeing as you staggered down this path anyhow, I'll humor you.
nope, I don't actually believe healthcare is free. I do know, that anyone can get medical insurance in europe, no matter what their condition, pre-existing condition, income, belly-button size and anything else american insurance companies use to weed out who they insure and never p
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>>>maybe you shouldn't assume where I live. also, please don't assume words inbetween my words. I never talked of free, and never implied I lived in the UK.
I never said you live in the UK.
Learn to read.
You said "come to europe" implying you live somewhere in europe, and I responded to that. Government healthcare works about as well as the USA's Amtrak (i.e. slow, poor quality, and very expensive).
maybe you shouldn't assume so much (Score:2, Informative)
Please have a look at this pdf [pnrec.org] (which admittedly uses OECD data from AD 2000, so they might be somewhat outdated, but it will do to make my point)
On page 9 you'll see that public health spending (as a %age of total) is lowest in the US, (and highest in Sweden) and on page 10 you'll see that the total amount spent per person on healthcare in the US is nearly 73% higher than in the next country listed (Germany).
Next, if you have a look at the CI
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>>>I love how yankee boys always rant on about freedom.
Actually it's about theft. You have a right to go to a doctor and get a new heart, lung, or whatever else you need, but you do NOT have a right to take the doctor's bill & demand the neighbors pay for it. Nor do you have a right to make them pay for your new Lexus. Or your new 100" television. Or new home.
Your neighbors' earned that money through the labor of their bodies, and it belongs to THEM. Forced removal of that money from their
So "private" healthcare isn't insurance? (Score:2, Insightful)
Insurance, in law and economics, is a form of risk management primarily used to hedge against the risk of a contingent loss. Insurance is defined as the equitable transfer of the risk of a loss, from one entity to another, in exchange for a premium, and can be thought of as a guaranteed small loss to prevent a large, possibly devastating loss. An insurer is a company selling the insurance; an insured is the person or entity buying the insurance.
So you're saying this *does* apply to taxes and public healthcare, but not to private health care?
because it seems to me to be really, really arbitrary how you don't see one as stealing, but you do the other.
And considering that US per capita health care spending is more than double that of the other G7/European countries, (see my other comment in this thread if you like) I'd say you should care more about getting the care costs down, as that will automatically lower (the need for those idiotically high)
How it works (Score:5, Informative)
If anyone is wondering how exactly this works, or wants to build their own, they might want to check out this Weekend Project [youtube.com]
Basically, if you've got a (near-)point source of light, and transmit it through the sample, there is only one path of light from the light, through a point in the sample, to a pixel on the sensor, so you don't need a lens. The farther away you place the sample and the closer you place the light source, the larger the image appears (but then you also need to progressively use a better, closer to a true point source light).
I imagine this could work very well with a naked silicon laser diode, since they appear as damn tiny, near point sources of light.
Re:How it works (Score:5, Interesting)
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Which, incidentally, is probably pretty close to what the cell phone + mods probably cost.
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Yes, I was agreeing with you. As in, the microscope costs no more than the cell phone, and is actually useful.
How about attching web-camera to microscope ? (Score:2)
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Well then that's it! (Score:3, Funny)
Interesting comment on Wired's website (Score:5, Insightful)
Posted by: jamesdionne:
I agree.
Bullshit (Score:5, Informative)
A. It can't detect HIV. No imaging technology short of electron microscopy can directly detect the virus itself and even electron microscope would be a retarded way to attempt diagnostics.
Even the original paper describing this technology showed that they have no sub-cellular resolution and even their size resolution was extremely unreliable for anything smaller than 15 microns... which all interesting human cells are (even if you could tell what size cells are you've accomplished.... nothing).
If they are suggesting they can do CD4+ T-lymphocyte counts they're either idiots, ignorant or both. There is no morphological distinction between a CD4+ and a CD4- T-lymphocyte. Even using fluorescence imaging (which they aren't) you have to be able to look at two colors of fluorescence (CD3 label to check to see if its a lymphocyte and a CD4 label to see if its CD4+) immunofluorescence is way too weak to be detected by a cell phone camera, especially a color sensor with 2 micron pixels. The CD4 antigen is never expressed at levels greater than approximately 50,000 / cell, the detection limit of a 5 micron pixel monochrome sensor (the bayer mask makes you lose about 30% of your light) is close to about 150,000 molecules. The bayer mask also makes your sensor pretty much useless for analytical applications, you're screwed if your green-fluorescent cell is centered over a red or blue-sensitive pixel which would happen in, oh, 66% of your pixels.
You run into almost identical sets of problems with every other so-called "application" of this "technology" so, yeah, bullshit.
IAABME.
Re:Bullshit (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
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Yes but I believe you forgot the CDx5 aphysical dipole bacterium, usually called "Bull" for its similarity to same, which is so small that it actually lives *within* molecules. These new scanners are able to detect levels of the excretions of these Bull, and plot them against known levels during infections of certain diseases. Scientists are still trying to figure out a name for these excretions, but suffice it to say the obvious choice was not picked for obvious reasons.
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Alternate Device Name (Score:5, Funny)
"UCLA researcher Dr. Aydogan Ozcan images thousands of blood cells instantly by placing them on an off-the-shelf camera sensor and lighting them with a filtered-light source (coherent light, for you science buffs)."
So instead of Occam's Razor, this is Ozcan's RAZR?
This is great news! (Score:2)
Now my next gen iPhone will be able to tell me *precisely* when it causes my brain cancer.
Reware projects (Score:3, Interesting)
Here's the big BIG thing that is going to hit mainstream radar soon, though I haven't even seen much tech punditry as usual this year, with everyone so deflated over the economy, but I bechya this is going to be massive over the next few years. Re-waring / re-purposing, whatever you call it, basically a new layer and second wind to technology in developed AND developing countries. People stop building things from scratch, it's more expensive than reuse. Just make small mods.
For a decade or more, we've been producing basically general purpose computers disguised as specific function devices, like phones, pda and suchlike. This is the first fruits of tech convergence coupled with a tightening economy and environmental reluctance to dispose in landfills. Such industry will emerge based around unique, perculiar, creative repurposing of hardware en-masse, it becomes inevitable. Out of nowhere will come cellphones transformed into musical instruments, alarm clocks, intruder detectors, baby monitors, health aides, point to point walkie talkies, and from that ad-hoc userland communication networks that will eventually bypass and replace the telco choke point/gatekeeper model (In other words expect much development to be resisted and made "illegal" by vested interest groups under the cry of "health, safety and security".) But that will do nothing to stop this enevitable shift that prevailing conditions invite. Basically we have a situation of commodity hardware. The raw materials are zero cost (would already be in a landfill if the manufacturers had their way) and are easy to jailbreak/unlock and retask. There's something like 2 or 3 discarded cellphones to every person on Earth right now. Objects that cost less than a skilled hour of salary, can be retasked in seconds with firmware flashing and combining via USB or wifi networks. Certain models of things are obviously going to become really popular because they can be more easily rewared, their second hand value will rise again.
Plus... (Score:5, Funny)
Forget HIV, Malaria is enough to make this cool (Score:5, Insightful)
I can see this possibly evolving into something that would be able to detect malaria infections, malaria is pretty big and easy enough to spot with good magnification and a little bit of training. Parasite laden blood cells are often chock-full of little plasmodium, so they would definitely have different optical properties in this kind of system. This could also probably do a reliable job of some basic blood values like hemoglobin levels, where the item in question has strong, distinct light-absorbing properties, but it won't come close to replacing an actual lab: there are too many things that just don't interact enough or interact distinctly enough with light to be measured that way, even if you had a lab-quality variable-frequency light source.
HIV, however, is a virus, and can not currently be detected or diagnosed microscopically (barring electron microscopes), so I'm a bit skeptical on that point. Besides, we have antibody tests that are cheap, effective and (thanks to foreign aid) available even in the poorest, most remote areas. The problem with testing for HIV is not detecting it, it's getting people tested. There is still a HUGE stigma around it, and people are (often with good reason) worried about the privacy of tests. If this guy has figured out how to detect and, more importantly, identify viruses using light microscopy, he'll be up for a Nobel prize, but I highly doubt that is the case. It's more likely that Wired just embellished the story a bit, which I think is unnecessary since even being able to quickly and reliably detect just parasites in the blood like malaria, leishmaniasis or trypanosomes would be a big help for many in the developing world.
I spent 2 years living in remote, rural Tanzania and some of the clinics near me diagnose malaria in every blood smear they see, because they don't have someone well trained enough to examine the blood, or they don't actually have a functioning microscope (they are freaking expensive, very fragile and hard to get out in the boonies) so they err on the side of caution. Even though they are probably correct a good percentage of the time, people were often "diagnosed" with malaria when they had none of the symptoms: Malaria gets the blame for nearly every ailment. This leads to overuse of anti-malarial drugs, which leads to drug-resistance. I also saw anemia being diagnosed very frequently as well, with out any way to properly test for it. It was the second most popular target for any ailment. "Anemic" people are encouraged to eat a substance made from red clay. It probably has plenty iron so it could actually help and probably can't do any harm, but it tasted about like you would expect dirt to taste.
To make my point: if this all this could do was detect malaria and hemoglobin levels, at even 10x the cost of a cell phone, but as portable and as durable as a cell phone (relative to a microscope that won't survive a car ride), it would make a sizable impact for a lot of people.
Using only an LED? (Score:2)
Shouldn't that be "Using only a LED"?
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lebscorpio answered, but the geeky grammar explanation is that use of a and an is tagged to phonetics, not letters, so a gets used for a consonant sound and an when for a vowel sound.
In this case:
an 'cause commonly LED is read as el-ee-dee, (probably non accurate phonetic spelling) and el is a vowel sound.
...but then reality sets in (Score:2)
You wouldn't legally be able to use this in the U.S. because it would be a HIPAA violation to transmit health information over an unsecured channel. It does allow for SSL-level encryption, however.
BTM
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Quite aside from the fact that in 90% of hospitals it's not permitted to use mobile phones anyway.
Reminds me of nintendo ekg monitors (Score:2)
Old NES consoles were equipped with an EKG cartridge that ran the software. Inputs were from sensors on the patient's body plugged into the controller ports. The display was any old TV they could get their hands on. Power on the console, power on the TV, el cheapo EKG that worked just fine.
Torrent Please! (Score:3, Insightful)
For the good of mankind.
And before anyone says a word about IP or profit motive, take a few minutes to think about how unchecked/unrealistic profit motive has lead the US and world economy.
Yes, the inventors/innovators (yup, that means the grad students as well professor) of this should make a tidy profit. This should not preclude non-profit use, and especially not preclude open discussion of how to make such potentially live saving technology better.
Its time for med-tech (and pharma) to come out of greed's dark ages.
Fail. Didn't say the magic word. (Score:3, Funny)
If only they have used the magic "iPhone" incantation this would have been a success.
Like they did here. [slashdot.org] Not very scientistie.
Just compare these two titles.
"Scientists Hack Cellphone To Detect Diseases" and "Scientists Hack iPhone To Detect Diseases"
Can't you see just how much cooler the one on the right is?
No? Hmm...
Did you try crossing and uncrossing your eyes or viewing it on an iPhone screen?
It looks MUCH cooler on an iPhone...
Much Better Info (Score:2)
Anyhow here are some links I found on google;
http://uwnews.washington.edu/ni/article.asp?articleID=3045 [washington.edu]
http://www.rsc.org/publishing/journals/AN/article.asp?doi=b705672a [rsc.org]
http://www.rsc.org/delivery/_ArticleLinking/DisplayHTMLArticleforfree.cfm?JournalCode=LC&Year=2008&ManuscriptID=b811158h&Iss=Advance_Article
http://arjourn
Re:But... (Score:5, Insightful)
Inventions like this raise the level of technology available to most of the world, and do more good for more people than (say) yet another model of iPod. One of the main things I've learned from studying history is that the maximum level of technology in a society is less important than the level that the masses have. Making things cheaper is one of the main ways in which technology has advanced; eg. iron is actually inferior to bronze in several ways, but is cheaper.
In fact, in some ways poor countries have had an opportunity to leapfrog the West. If your country has never had a copper-wire phone system, and you're just getting started with phones, you may as well start off with cell phones or fiber optics.
Parent
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If you think this is exciting, wait until next month's article on how to turn an ordinary 7-color photo ink jet printer into a $119 DNA sequencing machine.
Of course, throwing out the old one and buying new will turn out to still be cheaper than buying refills for them.
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In fact, in some ways poor countries have had an opportunity to leapfrog the West. If your country has never had a copper-wire phone system, and you're just getting started with phones, you may as well start off with cell phones or fiber optics.
That's an interesting point and something similar happened after world war two when Germany's obliterated industry got completely rebuilt with all the latest tech. But there's always the issue of who pays...
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Also see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_the_handicap_of_a_head_start [wikipedia.org]
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A roll of film is not reusable.