Slashdot Mirror
Use Your Cell Phone To Diagnose Blood Diseases
A group of research engineers at Berkeley have developed a mobile phone microscope that can photograph microbes in your blood, and analyze them for disease. The group hopes the device will be useful to doctors in developing countries to diagnose blood diseases in the field. The device uses a phone attachment with an LED, and magnified images are fed into the cell phone camera. Software installed on the phone analyzes bacterial counts, or the images can be sent to labs for quick analysis. UC Berkeley bioengineer Dan Fletcher led the CellScope research team. He said, "The same regions of the world that lack access to adequate health facilities are, paradoxically, well-served by mobile phone networks. We can take advantage of these mobile networks to bring low-cost, easy-to-use lab equipment out to more remote settings . . . We had to disabuse ourselves of the notion that we needed to spend many thousands on a mercury arc lamp and high-sensitivity camera to get a meaningful image. We found that a high-powered LED — which retails for just a few dollars — coupled with a typical camera phone could produce a clinical quality image sufficient for our goal of detecting in a field setting some of the most common diseases in the developing world."
if it works as advertized. Hmmm...
"If you want to know what happens to you when you die, go look at some dead stuff."
You mean like East Texas and Louisiana?
PC moderators can suck my White pierced, tattooed dick. If you think pride == hate, s/dick/Aryan meat mallet/g.
Someone is already writing the "Do I have Malaria" app I bet.
I repent my errant ways.
The forming of a post is similar to writing a symphony or growing a tomato. All are composed of flashes of creativity followed by monotonous work to bring that creativity into the physical realm. The saving grace of writing Internet posts is the brevity of the act as well as the immediate feedback of the jeering or cheering crowd.
Too muddy have I sullied myself; thought by some to be the Devil incarnate, to be moderated into oblivion so that naive eyes pass over my posts unknowingly and for the better.
Today I change! Turn over a new leaf! Here goes...
This will be a huge boon to Africa and India. These are places where the reach of technology is just now touching, and best of all it is doing it all wirelessly. So the people of these nations have cellphone access but no landline access. It's a very interesting turn of events.
The water-borne blood diseases of India and the insect-borne blood diseases of Africa are incorrigible killers. I hope that some of the damage Rachel Carson did can be reversed. Call it White-guilt or whatever, but helping our fellow man out of the dark ages and into a happier and healthier era can only be a good thing, I think.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
That thumbnail looks a lot like a weird rifle. It took me a second of trying to figure out what firearms could do to help diagnose blood diseases before I realized I was on the wrong track.
What doesn't kill you only delays the inevitable
I've invented a special coin that can tell you if you have a specific disease with only 50% false positives!
Your bit at the bottom is worth some up mod alone.
Anything can be found funny, from a certain point of view.
It probably has something to do with accuracy.
Here in the US, the 0.02% increase in accuracy of the really expensive equipment can make up for the cost differential in reduced litigation.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
As our technological portfolio increases, we should see more innovative cross-applications of technology such as this. Gradually a lot of the artificial barriers that have been put in place (including overly restrictive copyrights and acceptance of permanently proprietary tech) erode to facilitate even greater experimentation and development.
1) Cheap equipment is a bit worse. It might not impact performance at all, but chances are, some sue-happy person might win malpractice case thatnks to 'subpar equipment used'. Cheap in this case can be pretty expensive.
2) Costs are directly transalted to customer. And people will pay a LOT when their health is concerned. So, if customers can afford to pay you for expensive stuff ... you might as well let em pay because your profit margins can be bigger. Simply, you can have lab test cost 10$ and add margin of say 5$, or you can have lab test costing 100$ and add margin of 50$.
3) Expensive stuff means more profit for equipment makers (bigger price -> bigger margins). Enough to be able to advertize and add little, hmm, personal incentive to buy pricey stuff.
4) And sometimes, you really DO need that expensive stuff because it can make difference between life and death.
-- Technology for the sake of technology is as pathetic as eschewing technology because it's technology.
This is probably off topic but it just reminded me something that happened to me as a naive child. I had bought a watch at Kmart a few days earlier, and it had inexplicably stopped working. So I went back into Kmart to get them to fix it. Then the lady there tried to claim that I had a type of blood that prevented the use of all battery powered devices near my arm.
In retrospect she was probably just too lazy to try and fix it. Does something like this actually exist, and if so would it prevent this cell phone blood testing?
A Magic the Gathering Article and Forum Aggregator
Comment removed based on user account deletion
One of the reasons medical diagnostic gear is disproportionately expensive is lawsuits. We in the West are convinced that if we threaten to sue enough people we'll live forever.
I piss off bigots.
Mobile phone infrastructure is incredibly cheap to provision. You can put up a single tower and cover literally hundreds of square miles. Access to adequate health facilities need equipment, which costs much more than a cell tower, staff (also more expensive than the tower), transit (roads, ambulances, vehicles).
It's not a paradox that these areas get good cell coverage before other "modern" conveniences. It only makes sense. It's cheap and easy to provide cell service, and the low hanging fruit is always picked first.
They give you cancer but they can diagnose blood disease. Sounds like a fair trade-off. :-)
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
I've experimented with similar imaging, though I was just trying to take a picture of anything at all. I used a carboard box wrapped in aluminum tape, with a pinhole made from a piece of soda can. I used the scanner to measure the hole, and counted the pixels. I got close at least. I was using LED scanners, and wasn't able to find any cheap USB scanners which used a CCD and mirror -- the LED scanners have a scanning element the entire width of the scanner, and the construction prevents the light from being received from the pinhole. Also, there isn't much gain that can be applied to these kinds of things. I expected to take many images, and add them together. I used SANE and scanbuttond.
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
Big Pharma
When seeing this setup, I immediately thought "What about combining this with a digital SLR camera?".
Those usually have exchangeable lenses, and the instrument could lock to the camera body instead of the normal lens. That should give much better image quality due to the better sensor and still be affordable.
For $400 - $500 you have a wide selection of DSLR cameras at places like Amazon. Assume another $500 for the attached microscope and you get a $1000 camera microscope, which is still cheap for medical equipment.
C - the footgun of programming languages
A communicator and medical tricorder in one! Woohoo!
"You have anemia."
Crap.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
It's the first tricorder?
Call it White-guilt or whatever
Are you smoking crack? Africa was a pestilent shithole before White people colonized the place, and is now even worse afterwards. The only time that Africa's natural resources (it's by-and-large one of the most fertile continents in the world) were efficiently farmed and distributed were when those evil White folks were running the government and farming the land. Africa went from a savage wilderness populated by sub-normal tribes (I'll give you a clue - look at the average IQ of Blacks outside of America, it's almost always below the level that is considered mentally retarded) to a productive continent (okay, there were some issues, but nothing compared to the rampant disease and warfare now) to a war-ravaged disease-infested shithole that can't even feed itself. All the Black governments in Africa condone, at least by omission, genocide against the remaining White farmers, yet cannot farm the land themselves. Then they blame White people and aliens (no shit, this claim was made by S. Africa's Minister of Health about 5 years ago) for their health and social problems. They can use AK-47s, yet simple agrarian farming tools are beyond them. Uh-huh. If you can load an assault rifle, you can fuel and run a tractor.
I see nothing that White people should feel guilty about what-so-fucking-ever.
PC moderators can suck my White pierced, tattooed dick. If you think pride == hate, s/dick/Aryan meat mallet/g.
first its Berkeley
and UCLA already did this
I don't know all about that. Have you ever been to Africa? I do think our ancestors our from there. Anyone?
Get up!
Seems to me a mount-on camera is going to be prone to calibration issues with the cell phone camera lense.
Wouldn't it be better to develop an all-in-one microscope camera and push image fiels to an SD or CF card that then goes into a camera?
Bonus, They already exist (although this is USB insead of memory card.)
IANA (insert whatever competency needed to have a valid opinion here)
You stereotypers are all the same...
A group of research engineer's at Berkley have developed a mobile phone microscope that can photograph microbe's in your blood, and analyze them for disease. The group hope's the device will be useful to doctor's in developing countrie's to diagnose blood disease's in the field. The device use's a phone attachment with an LED, then magnified images are fed into the cell phone camera. Software installed on the phone analyze's bacterial counts, or the images can be sent to labs for quick analysi's. UC Berkeley bioengineer Dan Fletcher led the CellScope research team. He said, "The same region's of the world that lack acces's to adequate health facilitie's are, paradoxically, well-served by mobile phone network's. We can take advantage of these mobile network's to bring low-cost, easy-to-use lab equipment out to more remote setting's . . . We had to disabuse ourselve's of the notion that we needed to spend many thousand's on a mercury arc lamp and high-sensitivity camera to get a meaningful image. We found that a high-powered LED - which retail's for just a few dollar's - coupled with a typical camera phone could produce a clinical quality image sufficient for our goal of detecting in a field setting some of the most common disease's in the developing world."
a cheap way to determine that now...!
Little less intro next time.
I think he's just channeling Sheogorath.
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
This is such an obvious ploy for trying to get some of the Gates foundation money without doing anything to really improve diagnosis.
In places where there is no electricity how will you recharge the cell phone when it runs out of batteries. Oh wait solar panels right? Then to send the image you need the local cell phone network upgraded to send picture messages...
Why have all these complicated gizmos which do the same thing as somebody with a 20 year old microscope can do. Why not just make something to work with the 20 year old microscope? Why not just make a adapter that attaches the cell phone to the microscope eye-peice? As the previous comments said "where's the app?" Seriously! The authors put no effort into developing or implementing any software which is currently developed for identifying malaria or other diseases from digital RGB images.
Where is the additional functionality? This type of invention would never make it into common use in the field because there are already microscopes where people can get microscopes and they are easier to use.
This article is the case of over hyping an invention which has no practical use and using PLoS one, a journal which has a minimal peer review process, in a totally inappropriate way. I'm kind of annoyed that the editors of PLoS one would publish such low quality work which clearly couldn't get published in any other journal.
While yes it is a good example of what you can do with modern technology...this is more if an example of reinventing the wheel rather than an generating a diagnostic tool which could make a big difference.
yeah I'm publishing as an Anonymous Coward...
But will Obi-wan be able to tell me my midi-chlorian count?
The pinhole camera on an iPhone has an aperture smaller than the human pupil.
This works easily, on regular microscopes, without any special attachment.
A regular microscope is going to be much more versatile.
I'll have to read the PLoS Online article to see what I'm missing.
But can it detect midichlorian counts?
I've been to South Africa. And I follow the news (and I make sure to get my news from a variety of disparate sources, not just mainstream spoon-fed crap, and not just off-the-wall bloggers). And I've studied the history of various parts of the world that I find interesting for one reason or another. In this case, I find Africa interesting for the simple fact that it's a perfect example of differences between various cultures and races in post-imperialism. Also, the whole "we was slaves, poor us" bit in America gets old...at an early age, I got tired of all the politically correct crap about how the big, bad White people enslaved the poor, helpless Black people and dragged them over to pick cotton. I wasn't terribly surprised to discover that almost all slaves acquired by international slave traders were sold to said traders by Africans themselves! While I despise the concept of slavery regardless of who practices it, this historical fact is largely ignored by the PC crowd in the US, who either (a) don't mention it or (b) actively lie and say that slave traders predominantly raided Africa for slaves. It's easy to lie about things which lie (no pun intended) far enough in the past that most people don't consider it worthwhile to investigate, simply taking at face value whatever they are told.
As far as ancestry, this is a hotly debated topic in palaeoanthropology. Firstly, one needs to consider that modern man (homo sapiens sapiens) is very different from homo erectus, homo habilis, and other branches of the homo taxonomy. It is believed by almost all anthropologists that the origin of the homo genus (no jokes, please) is indeed from Africa. However, evidence suggests that neither of the current dominant theories (the "Out Of Africa", or recent - well, if one considers something like 50,000 years or so in the past to be recent, which it is in terms of the history of the planet - evolution of homo sapiens sapiens - modern man - directly from the African continent, nor the MRE - Multi-Regional Evolution - theory which suggests that after the homo genus spread across the world, speciation - which is the evolution of various subspecies - of the homo genus took place) is entirely accurate. So, as far as I know, regardless of what one believes, the origins of mankind lie in Africa. However, the evolution of culture and civilization seem to be a world-wide phenomenon, based upon fossil and other hard records (such as buildings and tools) that contradict the theory that civilization originated in Africa and Egypt. Remember that homo sapiens were spread across the world already by the time that the disputed transition to "modern man" occurred (something like 200,000 years ago).
So, speaking in terms of evolution, "modern man" (homo sapiens sapiens) evolved either beginning around 200K years ago (the MRE theory) or around 50K years ago (the "Out Of Africa" theory) from Africa/Egypt/Middle East. Regardless of which, let's consider more recent developments (such as agriculture and other advances that facilitated the transition from hunter-gatherer organizational units to agrarian society). These definitely favor the MRE theory (or some variation thereof, since I don't believe it's entirely accurate), as hard evidence shows that organized human society definitely did not evolve solely in the African region. There are Celtic ruins that date as far back as Sumerian ruins, yet it is highly unlikely that these civilizations had much, if any, contact at all. So it's most likely that the dawn of "modern" human civilization did not occur in one specific region and then spread to the rest of the world.
Okay, that taxed my knowledge of ancient anthropology and I did have to reference Wikipedia and other resources several times. Apologies for any minor errors, but the basic ideas are correct as far as I know. Now, fast-forwarding about 9K years, let's look at African society as it existed prior to colonization by Europeans. The kingdom
PC moderators can suck my White pierced, tattooed dick. If you think pride == hate, s/dick/Aryan meat mallet/g.
The reason why so much of Africa is in the dark ages is because of culture, not technology.
The US has an unparalleled health system -- the rest of the world is heading in a different direction.
For most of the world, it is not a high priority to preserve the ability of the private health care providers to make large profits. In the developed world, we do not have to watch eagle-eyed for any excuse to sue somebody, anybody, to lower health-related costs. Many of us have access to expensive equipment when we need it -- though admittedly we are not told that we need it quite as often as US customers are told to pay up.
1. Shoot the patient
2. Take a bloodsample of the wall.
3. Give an accurete diagnoses that whatever the patient might have, it doesn't really matter anymore.
And they kept me out of med school. Can you imagine?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.