Slashdot Mirror
Vietnam Medic Makes Homemade Endoscope
Davian writes "As reported by the BBC a Vietnamese doctor has managed to create an endoscope using an apparatus consisting of lenses and a webcam, linked to a Pentium 4. Total cost of extra hardware - less than $1000." The doctor plans to also assist other local hospitals that are facing similar budgetary contraints.
I just hope that this webcam is a little smaller than the one sitting on top of my monitor.
$1000? For all the good that bit of cheap kit is going to do, he might as well shove it up his arse.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
That's half the expense right there.
This is not meant to be a flame or troll activity, but surely if they wanted to keep the costs down they would not be using windows? Seems simple enough.
I'm also feeling quite odd about the pentium 4 ad statement there. It is connected to a computer, they can all do graphics manipulation these days. Seems we are still in the 'omgwtf pentium' age. Using another cpu would bring the price down yet further!
No seriously, this is some cool stuff and it's a creative way to deal with the problem. I'm curious how big the webcam in question is, since the article didn't really say unless I missed it on two read-throughs. (Early in the morning, you see.) Considering that I'm about to go out and do the same thing using $100,000+ in hardware today on a couple of patients, it's really interesting because this thing probably provides pictures that are almost as good, if not just as good.
Tomorrow some american company will sue him (and this will cost them a LOT more than $30000 * number of provinces in vietnam up front).
Gotta love this world we live in. Can't have people without money cured too, because if we do cure them, why would people with money pay for treatment ?
Just a thought
truth be told, that $30k price-tag is mostly profit for the med-co's currently stiffing american hospitals out of cheap, quality, medical equipment.
..
..
in vietnam they have no such compunction. they don't mind building things which work, for cheap, and not screwing their customers for every last penny they can
i say, great. american medical 'prowess' is propped up by insanely disproportionate profits. i daresay a few public hospitals in detroit could stand to DIY the ol' endoscope too, and save a few bucks for those AIDS drugs they've gotta stock up on in order to be 'qualified' for "Federal Support".
sheesh. no big surprise that things are cheaper outside of the worlds largest continent full of greedy, selfish pigs
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
nurse ! pass the duct tape !
$ strings FTP.EXE | grep Copyright
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
This would have be REALLY useful when I networked the house - there were a couple of snags that if I could have seen round the bend... Ah well, what's wrong with a few more holes in the walls...
A couple of people have pointed out that not using windows would probably make it cheaper. Don't forget the guy isn't a computer expert. Its probably all that he already knows how to use. I think that the steps used here could be important for helping to lower the medical expenses in other countries. Its probably possible to make the equipment cheaper etc, but don't forget that its no use using a different system - if you don't know how to use it, or don't know the difference between different companies. Personally I'm wondering how effective the equipment is, its probably better than nothing, but how much can it detect, how invasive is it in comparison and when would it likely to be used.
bah.
That's one webcam link which will not be slashdotted.
For once, the goatse trolls may well be on-topic.
Unfortunately, I am not Wil Wheaton
The most important part of an endoscope, that being the scope still needs to be bought. Now if the guy made the actual scope and not just the webcam adapter for the scope, then that would be truly impressive. once again i feel misled by slashdot because the title suggests the guy actually built an endoscope out of a webcam. Shame on you slashdot
Nuclear war would really set back cable. - Ted Turner
Ok, he managed to make a cheap endoscope. That's good and bad at the same time. Because a endoscope's purpose is to be inserted inside your body, especially inside supposedly sick bodies, it has to be steril so as to avoid contamination (AIDS anyone ?). Using an expensive endoscope (like in developped countries) forbids to use it once and dispose it. So endoscope are cleaned the best one can do without damaging it and re-used. This can lead to contaminations (in fact it's a cause for blood bank to refuse your blood). That's why a cheapper endoscope could be great for developped countries (on-time usage). But on the opposite it's not so great for second/third-world contries because I doubt a webcam is designed to withstand the heat, uv, and/or chemical used to clean the expensive endoscope, nor will it be disposed after use because cheap isn't there. This could be a major health problem. So I'm somewhat skeptical on the path taken by this doctor.
a good friend who is a midwife, is going to work in rural portugual next year, and will be involved in opening a community-based birth-house. (sorry, i don't know what a geburtshaus is in english)
but some of the equipment that they need, such as a CTG machine, cost upward of euro2500!
i've seen this machine, and it's nothing special. but it has lots of dedicated equipment that could easily be replaced by generic computer equipment.
this also got me wondering about creating some sort of open DIY medical equipment repository.
seeing this article, i can well believe that a lot of people could benefit from such openly available research!
--- blackironprison, where ignorance is bliss....
It doesn't sound like he purchased finely machined parts constructed out of surgical steel and other surgery rated equipment.
With that in mind. I am unsure if I would want to be the first person this is used on and I definately wouldn't want to be the third, fourth fifth or last person this machine is used on...
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
You can seriously tell someone to stick Windows up their ass! And, those that do the work can take this job and shove it.
Just another day in Paradise
I'd put down my life savings right now that says US hospitals (even the poorest and most destitute) will continue to buy the $30,000 one.
That's what's wrong with the US healthcare system. "Why do something cheap when we can spend even more money for something just as useful?"
-Arthur
Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules
I'm working in the medical device business, and a large part of our expenses is for stuff like clinical studies, documentation to comply with FDA regulations and such. Also, the relatively low numbers tend to make manufacturing more expensive than for mass-manufactured stuff.
Last but not least, the market seems to readily accept the high prices manufacturers are demanding. In fact, an ex-colleague told me a story about a surgical instrument that failed in the market because of a too low price. Doctors did not trust that "cheapshit" stuff. After a rebranding and raising of the price, the same instrument did fine in the market. Expect management to happily take advantage of such thinking.
Overall, I'm not surprised that a professional endoscope costs 30.000, even if something almost (I suspect Dr Nguyen Phuoc Huy made a few compromises in the used materials) equivalent can be built at 1000 in materials.
C - the footgun of programming languages
How cheaply can it be done for?
It should be able to take images from a wide range of input (devices, resolutions, color corrections, user selectable, and NOT from a config list requiring rebooting, if you please,) feeding something like The Gimp for image manipulation, in real time.
Guy's in Vietnam and had no support issues with M$ We can do better for cheaper.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
I was the designer and developer of a major endoscopic image capture system here in Australia for a company who sold thousands of copies in the UK, US and parts of Asia. A lot of the difficult work at the time wasn't actually capturing the images and storing them, that was relatively easy, VfW did a lot of the work on most video capture boards, even though it didn't give you as much control over the video overlay as you really wanted. Some video cards provided MCI drivers which gave much more control, zoom, pan etc. Like the Matrox capture cards. All video endoscopic systems provided some sort of analog video output, composite, S-Video, RGB. The major systems were Olympus, Fujitsu and Pentax with a few minor players in specialty endoscopic fields.
The hard part was actually remotely triggering the capture on the PC. We initially tried to get the specialists to tell a PC operator to press a button, but they just got frustrated with the whole procedure.
Our next thing was to use the buttons on the scopes themselves (the flexible scopes have two dials for lateral movement and usually one or more buttons which can be assigned to various functions on each unit) so we slowly begged and borrowed one of each model of each type of scope unit so we could create interfaces to plug into them.
Myself and a colleage researched over 100 units, measured signals, found suppliers of connectors, found manufacturers who could copy proprietary connectors (and there were about 30 different types of custom connectors in the end) and then wrote the code.
We started using it for upper endoscopy and colonoscopies, but it was sold for ERCP's, MRI/PET/CAT scanning, rigid scope procedures and also for overhead cameras in surgery.
It's an interesting field, I personally sat in on over 200 procedures to test the software, colonoscopies being the worst. Not great a procedure. I'm glad they give people drugs to make them forget that 15 minutes...
Task Mangler
Boy, wouldn't Freud have a field day with you lot! I'm of the perception that the webcam stays 'high and dry' on top of the PC (or somewhere else close by) and doesn't go anywhere near your moth^H^H^H^Hbutt. Else why would he be tinkering with optics and buying an $800 probe?
I'm thinking the endo probe does the dirty work so to speak, and the system of optics that he's come up with makes the other end of the probe play nicely with a common-or-garden webcam.
Not withstanding that 'endoscopes' can be used on both 'ends', I wanna know why in the picture accompanying TFA, he appears to be shoving the endoscope down the back of the vict^H^H^H^Hpatient's kneck?!
I find your ideas intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
A Dutch F16 technician ones showed me the boroscope they were using to check the insides of the engine. He told me that a couple of weeks before a surgeon of the local hospital had been cursing when he saw the scope. The surgeon had been requesting a boroscope for three years already and couldn't get the funds allocated and here the local AFB had a couple on hand.
Use Adsense for Charity
...to Intel Inside.
Because once again, it makes it look like the initial cost of the software is the only thing that determines the total cost of ownership. I am a fairly computer literate person, and every time I mess around with Linux there is some stumbling block that prevents me from doing what I am trying to do and I then have to spend hours googling or in chat rooms trying to figure out what the hell I need to do. Like it or not, accept it or not, I usually don't have to do this when running Windows, generally things just work. Now, I am not trying to bash Linux either, I run dual boot because I am interesting in learning and the reality is that there is a steep learning curve involved with Linux. And especially in the professional world, time is money.
If you equate Charity with Socialism, then I can understand how you are confused. Perhaps explaining the difference will clear things up for you.
Charity - voluntary giving
Socialism - compelled confiscation
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
A nice, insightful parent post and you spin it back into a tedious little morality play. I knew it was too good to last.
Regarding porn, I remind you that there is more than one American and if one person loves Jesus while another stars in jizz flicks, this does not meet any definition of hypocrisy.
Saving Private Ryan was on TV, so it's difficult to sustain your argument that you can't show it on TV. Further, despite concerns from some stations, the FCC issued a preemptive ruling stating that there would be no fines for showing the movie uncut.
As for Janet Jackson, even the Ameriphobic Guardian cited a poll in which on 17% of Americans were "very concerned" about the Jackson incident -- the same percentage of people who voted for Le Pen in France. Neither is a sign of the impending apocalypse.
Kill, Tux, kill!
They told him what he could do with his Pentium 4, and he took them literally.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
I've heard of people putting iPods up their rectums but never Pentium 4 PCs! This is a whole new trend.
Best Buy can have you arrested
The Go Digital program that this appeared in is still available on the BBC's servers. The endoscope bit starts at 17 minutes into the stream.
Jeff
Seriously if you are looking for a good project to work on it can't get much better than this, or something similar. If you can get a few people together - an expert each in hardware, analog/digital, software, and domain-specific industrial knowledge there are bound to be lots of ways you can change the world. The biggest problem with people who want to do good for the third world (as far as I have experienced and been told) is that you imagine everything can be fixed with the net, have no grip on higher priorities, etc. But this is a real case of something that is needed, and some experts could even make it a better project, saving the M$ tax being the least of it. How about figuring out a way to get a freescope to every hospital in Vietname or whatever country you pick (how about Cambodia?) Maybe someone reading this in Vietname would talk to the doctor about setting up a free endoscope construction online resource, starting with buying a scope and using windows with a faq but ultimately going full blown from scratch and with ways to hook in small/medium size manufacturers.
This person in Vietname wouldn't have to do the entire project himself (but must be responsible to getting things done, or else they won't), but can ask for help from people on slashdot and they'll tell their friends, and so on.
I've helped a friend who created the Sihanouk hospital in Cambodia and that individual is a very resourceful retired journalist able to pull in all kinds of favors. Definitely not common. But one interesting project was telemedicine, getting links in to check with foreign hospitals for diagnosis. I also met someone who was using a pda and cheap sensors for very inexpensive testing and telemetry (Grenoble Hospital I believe, in France). The best is if you get a doctor who is also a whiz at every other necessary skill and doesn't have a lot of patients to worry about.. but as you can see it took this man 2 years and it's in his spare time. That is fine. Now can anybody else help him or people like him, who understand exactly what the need is and just need help to get it IMPLEMENTED?
Run don't walk and find those key people. You can change the world.