Slashdot Mirror
Cheap Blood Clot Detection Device
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.'"
I have a feeling that some surgeons will be sleeping alot better post-operation when they can monitor something like this more effectively.
Inevitably someone is going to say "Well yeah, that means 2% died. Rough lot of good that did them."
Before that person is you, think of the 98% that lived. I bet they're pretty happy that their chances of detection and survival went way up. And if you were sitting on an operating table in rural India with a poorly underfunded doctor wondering what's going wrong with you, wouldn't you like to take those odds too?
The ______ Agenda
http://www.infrascanner.com/
Looks like they're based in PA, USA... But due to US regulations, they aren't allowed to test the device on patients in the US, and have outsourced such clinical testing to India.
appleguru.org
98% accuracy!! What the blood clot?!
In other news...
/T
Doctor Who spotted in India!
Warning: This sig contains a small bug. ==> *
If this thing will be common I HATE MRIs but, I've been having massive headaches during and after sex. and yes I will wait, because I know the MRI tubes read my mind everytime go into one, and they won't let you bring a tin foil hat.
"We found a 98% accuracy for showing blood clots or haematomas.'"
Medical examiners usually have a better average accuracy.
What's next? Warp drive?
I have to say as a blood clot sufferer this invention sounds great. For those of you who don't know the previous means for checking for blood clots was to drain out all the patients blood and let it settle, then the doctors would count the blood clots floating on the surface. On one occasion my doctor accidently dropped his pen in the vat, then he tried to fish it out. I went completely spare and told him if he expected to put that blood back in me after he'd been sloshing around in it he had another thing coming.
I have nothing compelling to say
for your insensitive clots.
Hemoglobin has a different absorption spectrum when it's oxygenated (oxyhemoglobin) or not (desoxyhemoglobin). An interesting characteristic of this spectrum is observed in the near-infrared part or light (700-850nm): http://omlc.ogi.edu/spectra/hemoglobin/index.html
In the infrared part, oxyhemoglobin absorbs less light than desoxyhemoglobin ; it's the contrary in the red part. So if we shoot these near-infrared wavelengths (and some more, to get a good idea of the absorption spectrum) in the head and detect it somewhere else (around 5-6cm from the source), we can get information on the concentration and oxygen level of the hemoglobin in the middle of the emitter and the detector. If the hemoglobin is more present than somewhere else in the head, and it's less oxygenated than usually, we get a good idea that there's something wrong there.
Other advantages : infrared light is non-ionizing, so it's absolutely no dangerous to use that kind of instrument continuously on a person until we are sure there's no problem.
It's brilliant and I'm glad to see that kind of instrument emerging.
I hate all sigs, mine included.
Oi!
Who are you to call my blood clots cheap?!
I don't entirely agree...
Aside from the fact that a lot of the time, we're more worried about post-op *bleeding* (which we'd see on CT) than simple clotting, I'm not sure how you'd tell appropriate clotting from dangerous clot, *except* through monitoring symptoms. Its not the clots after surgery that are dangerous, but when the clots are in areas that suffocate healthy tissue (ischemia).
And a CT looking for new infarct would be useless. An MRI might help, but not a CT.
And, yes, IAAD.
Obviously a great development, but I wondered what the false alarm rate was. The device can detect 98% of blood clots, but how often does it say there is a blood clot when there actually isn't? False alarms could lead to costly, unnecessary surgeries that insurance (at least, insurance in the US) may not cover.
My original comment was made with broad generalizations in an attempt to counterbalance the lack of perspective on medical percentages that many people seem to exhibit. On the other hand, parent appears to actually know something, so please mod him / her up.
The ______ Agenda
This will be most useful for those of us with heads 6cm wide.
Could you scan a whole head with a sufficiently bright torch in your mouth? Maybe you'd need that transparent skin mod from a while back too... It's be kind of strange having your eyeballs illuminated from the back :)
I wonder if the same tech could also be used to detect DVT too? They could build it into the X-Ray machine at airports so that on the way in and out and a bell would ring if it found a blood clot in your legs (it would make sense to detect them on the way in too!)
I wonder when there is such a breakthrough device in progress, isn't it unfair to have $1 million for a life saving cheap device research? I differ with people who sat CT/MRI scan is still to be carried out.So what? A CT/MRI scan minutes late can prove fatal and this is exactly this device is supposed to do , reduce this highly critical time gap to find out when actually to look for a scan as an option.Hell yes it is no way a replacement but an aid to save precious human life.
Some may argue 1$ million is hell lot of money.Indeed it is.But shouldn't we be spending more money on projects like this rather than on researching weapons of mass destruction and warfare.
I wish the team of doctors and researchers my best wishes for such a breakthrough device.
~psr
-- "Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration" - TAE --
You don't understand the accuracy complaints, grasshopper, and proceed to bravely fight (maybe involuntarily) a complete straw-man that exists only in your imagination. Remember: just because you don't understand something, doesn't mean everyone else is an idiot. It just means you need to get some more data, and maybe engage the brains.
The complaints about accuracy are for cases where the false positives are (A) a lot more than the new positives detected by the new method, and (B) the consequences for a false positive are bad enough to matter.
E.g., to give an example based on everyone's (in the USA) favourite terror scare, let's say you have a test which identifies terrorists with 98% accuracy. The problem is that terrorists are actually very very few: in the USA in the year _before_ 9/11, there were exactly zero terrorist attacks. (So, yeah, it was soo worth giving up some rights in exchange for protection from a largely non-existant threat.) So let's say, 1 in a million is a terrorist and planning to blow himself up. Heck, let's even say, whopping ten in a million. The problem is that the new method would detect 0.02 * 1,000,000 = 20,000 false terrorists in the same million.
If such a bogus method were taken seriously enough, it would (A) swamp the law enforcement with false positives (e.g., if you had to thoroughly check 20,000 people a day on a major airport, you better build an extra wing just for the extra security guards), and (B) possibly create a bunch of problems for some people which are, in fact, innocent citizens. And often without them even being told what's wrong with them, or how to set the record straight.
In some other cases, the accuracy is actually worse than touted and can be gamed. E.g., profiling was shown to actually lower the accuracy in airport checks, _and_ provides a handy-dandy way for a real terrorist group to check who's suspected and who's clear. Just send everyone on a bunch of unrelated flights, and see who gets a cavity search every time, and who isn't even looked at by the guards. Voila, now you know who gets to carry the bomb on the plane.
_That_ is the scenario in which some of us worry about accuracy, or lack thereof.
Does this scenario fall in that category? I don't know. A doctor is probably more qualified to comment there about how much better it is than existing methods, and what the consequences of a false positive. Maybe no more than someone being shoved in a CT scanner, which is expensive, but wth, it's not the end of the world. On the other hand, if it meant directly re-opening their head because a false positive said "EMERGENCY!", _then_ we'd have to worry about that 98% accuracy. (But thankfully doctors aren't that stupid. Unlike politicians.)
At any rate, again: just because you don't understand a problem, doesn't mean everyone else is an idiot. Sure, it may provide an ego-masturbation boost to post derisive drivel about people who worry about accuracy, but at the end of the day, maybe it's not them who are in a laughable position. Maybe the one who deserves to be laughed at is the one acting snotty based on nothing more than pre-conceptions, ignorance and mis-understanding.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Death.
The article describes what seems to be an AC/DC coupled photoplethysmograph (PPG). However I am having a hard time believing that an infra-red signal can penetrate three centimeters through the skull, reflect off a blood clot, and be detected again. I recently worked at a company that made PPG devices that put an infra-red diode against the skin and then used a photo-detector to sense blood volume changes according to the amount of IR radiation that got reflected.
The product that I worked with was a kluge from the late 1970s. All that company's technology was based on simple op-amps, TTL chips, resistors and capacitors hand-stuffed into through-hole PCBs. I got fired for incessantly insisting that they bring their technology up to 21st century standards. They said that there was no money (they wouldn't even let us buy a vacuum desoldering station), but the 80-year-old owner was constantly giving away millions of dollars to ultra-conservative local politicians. And lecturing his employees about how cancer could be cured by positive mental attitude.
Anyway, a lot of what passes for 'advanced' medical equipment in the US is actually kludged ancient technology. It sells for absurd amounts of money because of the bizarre 'cost-is-no-object' state of the American Health Care industry. And a lot of people are beginning to be denied basic medical care because they don't have the money to pay for it. But a lot of medical tests could be done with inexpensive high-tech equipment that has been modified for home medical use.
This concept of an inexpensive device that uses state-of-the-art technology is a good place to bring up the subject of open source biomedical devices. There may come an underground movement to build very high-tech medical equipment cheaply for people like us. Equipment that surpasses the quality of what is found in ordinary hospitals, but costs one tenth of the price. It would have no FDA certification, and would be quite illegal. No accredited doctor would use it.
But when you have no medical insurance (or you are paying $300 a month for it and have a $3000 deductable, which is the same thing as having no realistic medical care available), then the choice of paying $1500 for a medical test with FDA certified equipment and paying $50 for the same test to someone who has non-FDA-certified equipment really isn't any choice at all. Of course, if you do have a great job where all your medical expenses are covered and the insurance company picks up the tab for your $1500 test (and charges you a $20 co-payment fee), well then yes, you would be aghast at even the idea that someone would submit to a medical test without the most expensive possible equipment.
But chances are that you're not one of those people. So the idea of open-source medical equipment doesn't repulse you.
The difference between open source software and open source medical equipment would be that the medical equipment would be illegal. And the people doing the test and interpreting the results would be subject to arrest for practicing medicine without a license. But in many cases, the test results are just electronic data and can be analyzed by computer to give same level of professionalism as found in the hospital. And again as millions of middle class people find themselves shut out from licensed health care due to the collapse of the insatiable greed of the health care industry, more and more people will be willing to accept and trust the data from an unlicensed high-tech medical device that costs a tiny fraction of the same machine in a for-profit medical facility. There's nothing holy about the medical industry.
The electronic medical equipment industry in the USA is in about the same place as the US automobile industry was in early 1970's. Obsessed with trivial regulations, smug in their belief in their omnipresent power, and completely unaware that they are about to get totally blindsided by people w
Couldn't he have just used his Sonic Screwdriver instead?
Thanks, I'll be here all week.
I love this device. While it is only testing for clots and issues on the brain, I am wondering when something like this will be available to scan for things like a Pulmonary Embolism (which I had). The most annoying thing in the world was getting numerous ultra sounds to test for more clots in my legs... Hopefully someday, though, we will have something like a tricorder where we scan the body really quick and know everything that is going on... someday though... I am hoping... Please? lol.
-- Josh
"Whoopie! Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but that's a long one for me!" - Pete Conrad
Can detect blood cloths, pussy cloths, ras cloths and what not, so why do we need a device for such trivial job ?
yush
Can you even read, lemming, or are you in it just for the ego masturbation? No, seriously, I don't even see a need to try to be nice with a fucking retard.
Can you even understand what an example is? No, I don't think so, and here you prove it fully. You're too stupid to even comprehend that "here's an example where X applies" does _not_ mean that this particular case is equivalent to X.
Did you even see that the last paragraph explicitly says that "doctors aren't that stupid" to do the same mistakes politicians do? Where _do_ you find any support for your retarded rants about "black and white medicine", smooth-brain? Where do you find support for that "you did", when I explicitly state that this case probably doesn't fit the scenario where we worry about accuracy?
Let me guess, you didn't even read that far, you just had to jump do your own verbal masturbation as early as possible. Right? Retard.
Learn to read, idiot. Maybe even get some elementary comprehension skills. Who knows, with enough practice you may even be able to *gasp* read more than a paragraph before jumping in to do your ego masturbation. Won't that be nice? Heh.
And again, get your head out of your ass. Just because you don't understand a scenario, or (as you prove here) _when_ its used, doesn't make you the genius and everyone else an idiot. It just means _you_ are the idiot whose ego gets even in the way of elementary reading and comprehension skills. Try to first understand the problem and only _then_ let it rip with the scathing ego-masturbation, little retard.
Or let me guess, penis^H^H^H^H^H brain envy? You just feel insecure enough to _have_ to mock those who actually understand statistics and actual science? Yeah, that would explain a few things.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Of course, the device is probably useful, and it's probably not dangeorus.
I'm just saying that the argument "it's non-ionizing, therefore it's harmless" is stupid. Non-ionizing radiation can be very dangerous.