The Sound of Cells

Alert Slashdot reader jamie pointed out a story in Smithsonian Magazine on the subject of listening to the sounds cells make in order to detect abnormalities.

Makes total sense...

[turrican]

This is one of those things is basically an inevitability, waiting only for the proper tools to exist.

Reminds me of how a mechanic might listen to an engine, or part of it, to determine what's going on inside.

dolphin tech

[Doc Ruby]

Aren't there lots of stories about dolphins bumping swimmers repeatedly with their snouts, causing a medical examination which discovers a tumor? I haven't heard any theories that dolphins are causing the tumors (though they'd have plenty of material for revenge), but these bigbrained cousins are notorious for their sense of sound, superior to our sight. Maybe we should be certifying them, instead of crudely replacing them with machines.

I used this before for network monitoring.

[dekashizl]

I've used audio feedback in conjunction with network monitoring, and it worked VERY well. I was developing a SOAP-based client/server app, and I tied a different sound (MIDI note actually, sometimes from the percussion instrument, sometimes ascending chords on piano) to each type of message the client and server could send.

In the course of a standard interaction, it would play login, login ack, getlist, getlist-resp, etc. I could hear the timing between calls (yeh, SOAP is kind of slow like that), and more importantly hear if it was doing the right things. You pick it up *immediately* when a chord progression is major, minor, or just plain wrong), All this without taking up any screen real estate.

This works so well, I recommend it highly. AFAIK there are no standard ways of doing this, but it certainly would be great to put some standard techniques and libraries together!

Diagnostics

[gusmao]

Although they may eventually reach some interesting results, it seems very unlikely that this research will change the way diagnostics are made nowadays. I don't see how someone could replace or question physiological exams based on a source of information so unreliable and subject to noises as this.

Anyway, these guys [berkeley.edu] have already prooved that, in some situations, is very hard to get useful information throught sound, even when you know what you may be looking for.

Re:The smell of cancer

[jeni generic]

I hope they continue to delve into the olefactory sences as well. They found out that some dogs can smell melanoma [canoe.ca]. Combine that with sound technology and we can get the lousy HMO check up process out of the way. "Hey doc, whats with this mole on my boob?" "Its a third nipple." "No shit, are you sure it's not cancer" "Of course I'm sure, I'm a doctor!"

Re:Other identifiers

[SEWilco]

Move the needle off the cell. If the sound stops then you know the sound wasn't coming from the surronding fluid or the tip of the microscope.

Am I missing something?

Maybe the cell or its wall is vibrating due to sound from outside the cell. The probe might not pick it up, for example the cell wall may be resonating to a certain frequency in the sounds while the probe might be too small and rigid.

Re:I used this before for network monitoring.

[Jtheletter]

Ditto, I wrote a quick routine to play .wav files and plugged that into my code in place of MessageBox alerts for debugging an automated chemistry cell that was running in another lab.

I used babelfish and AT&Ts text-to-speech page to make a bunch of alert sound files in french. Besides being extremely useful (no more interrupting my workflow with a popup message everytime something happened in the lab) it was amusing as hell to watch my coworkers' reactions whenever my workstation started babbling in french about the status of sample sets.

Re:dolphin tech

[marshac]

I had an oceanography professor who was swimming with some dolphins.... she noticed that they were not playing a "rough" as they had in the past... a week later, she found out that she was pregnant. I really doubt that even dolphins could detect the type of vibrations described in the story however.

Re:dolphin tech

[Doc Ruby]

Dolphins emit the vibrations. They "see" the layered contents of objects around them in the echoes into their foreheads and snouts. We do the same thing with radar petroleum exploration, but with less feeling, and without growing up in exclusively that sensorium.