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Scientists Hack Cellphone To Detect Diseases
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."
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.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
If anyone is wondering how exactly this works, or wants to build their own, they might want to check out this Weekend Project
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.
We need to stop worrying about ending hunger there and start getting every last one of them a cell phone!
Posted by: jamesdionne:
I agree.
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
Well, it's not like those countries are literally in the Stone Age. They're dirt-poor by Western standards, but they have access to some modern technology and can scrape together the money for relatively cheap stuff. (Unfortunately this includes Kalashnikovs.) As the West continues to develop cutting-edge technology, the standard for what kind of things the world's poor can afford rises. That is, nobody at all had LEDs until the 20th century.
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.
Revive the Constitution.
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.
"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?
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.
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.
When it test's a patient positive for HIV, it plays a polyphonic ringtone of 'Always looks on the bright side of life'
What if Tetris was invented by Nazis?
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.
"Cheeze it!" - Bender
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...
A roll of film is not reusable.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
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.
open source modern art: laser taggi
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.
If only they have used the magic "iPhone" incantation this would have been a success.
Like they did here. 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...
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Please have a look at this pdf (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 CIA World Factbook: (website isn't working here, so using wikisource)
and look at the figures for average life expectancy in the US compared to socialist Europe, the average in the US: about 74 (male) and 80 (female), whereas in Sweden, (which admittedly has better life expectancy than some EU countries, but i can't be arsed to find the median country) it's 78/82 years (2004 est)).
Additionally, the Infant mortality rates:
US: 6.63 deaths/1,000 live births
Swe: total: 2.77 deaths/1,000 live births
Sweden's per capita spending: less than 1700$
United States per capita spending: 4100$
Please show me how or why "government healthcare is bound to fail", or, alternatively, have a look at actual data.
(Disclaimer: since 2004 a number of european countries are reforming/considering reforms to health care funding, because it's inefficient in some ways. Nevertheless, the fact remains that health care spending here costs less than half of what it costs in the US.)
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) premiums.
It's outright sad that one third to half the US doesn't have access to health care, and that (anecdotal point) "Free Clinics" can still charge you 200$ for their free services. (this was for an SF guy i know who needed an allergy prescription worth 20$)
And it's all made possible because of that weird fiction that health care is something special, rather than a basic right.
It allows doctors to charge more (although they also have to pay enormous tuition fees because of lack of government funding), insurers to require more (because people can opt out, there's less carrying power or whatever it's called, because of the reduced number of people paying into the system, which means the costs can be spread less), and so on.
imagine how much more affordable health care could be if spending was more in line with european spending.. you'd be able to keep healthy 60-80% more people easily at the same cost, people who then would also have smaller chances of contracting other illnesses (prevention is better than cure and all), who could work more (because they were healthier), and so on.
Choosing to have a partially-diseased workforce is stealing from your GNP just as much as other things are.. it just depends on how far ahead you're able/willing to look.