Cheap Blood Clot Detection Device 103
Gearoid_Murphy writes "The BBC details the news of a cheap handheld device to detect blood clots on the surface of the brain. The device uses infrared light to penetrate 3 cm into the body; light that has passed through clotted blood changes detectably. A doctor who is testing the device in India said, 'We found a 98% accuracy for showing blood clots or haematomas.'"
Woah.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Company Website... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:To stem the statistical comments: (Score:5, Insightful)
Say 98% lived with this new tech. What percentage lived without it ? Maybe 94%. You can't infer that the previous methods of detection/avoidance were mediocre just because the new method has a high success rate. The article certainly gives no comparisons.
Re:Woah.. (Score:3, Insightful)
And provides a lot more information than this handheld gadget can. Given a choice, I'd opt for some real imaging rather than a high-tech studfinder.
Re:Woah.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Woah.. (Score:4, Insightful)
This will help determine if patients need immediate attention.
As long as the false positive rates aren't high and this device is sensitive enough to detect the common cases, it will be useful.
Re:Woah.. (Score:3, Insightful)
I can see this tech being used some day to detect clots in legs, arms, etc.
False alarms? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:You don't understand, grasshopper (Score:2, Insightful)
And clearly, anyone in a third world village for which the measly 400,000 dollar CT scanner cost is too much should simply be airlifted to a larger national hospital where they can be treated properly. Airlifting a should be a fast and easy solution and is done in places like that all the time. And, of course, the astronomical and rising cost of healthcare in the US ensuring that 45 million of us have no health care shouldn't stop us from thinking about the children for whom the ridiculously expensive CT scanning procedure could save, assuming they ever went to a hospital. After all, access to good medical procedures shouldn't be gated on ability to pay, so it never is, right? And having a nurse do a couple of CT scans throughout a night "just to check" is a routine procedure in most trauma cases anyway, and as such the need for a cheap, easy, handheld, and fast scanner that has basically no operating costs besides a bathroom-break worth of time and a little drain on some rechargable NiCads is gratuitous.
This is exactly why I posted that some people would see a "98% accuracy rate" and immediately find fault. And you did, congratulations. Almost always, these are people who feel that you shouldn't use condoms because they're "only 99% effective when used correctly." Or those who decide not to take their diabetes medicines because it might only be about "95% successful" in stemming the tide of the disease. People want medicine to be black or white, good or bad, fixes you or not, but in reality medicine is a really mushy, nasty area. Certain tests may only have a 30% detection rate, but they do it anyway because detecting certain diseases at that level is better than not detecting them at all, especially to the people who get detected. Heck, CPR on cardiac arrest victims only reduces their death rate from 95% to 90%, which means that it's by and large almost useless. Almost. To those extra 5% who survive, it's very, very nice to have around.
Having a Sociology degree, I'm well aware of just how easy it is to make percentages lie, and am happy that people seem to have developed a healthy distrust for them. What you learn to trust, if data isn't readily available, is people. If people in the field are happy with this development, and the technological basis behind it seems sound, maybe it's worthy of further examination. If they're not, like the terrorist scanners, it's probably bunk.