New app allows blood imaging from a smartphone
pharmafile | August 7, 2014 | News story | Medical Communications, Research and Development | app, digital, smartphone
An IT research team has developed a new smartphone app that works in conjunction with a small lens add-on that can analyse allows blood in remote areas.
The app, called Athelas, won a prize at a coding event held by the prestigious start-up hub Y Combinator in July.
Users can take a picture of their blood using the lens attachment and then sent to the app’s servers. The results are then sent back to them.
In its submission to the Y Combinator competition, the designers say: “Literally every facet of the medical world relies on blood cell analysis to diagnose conditions. Malaria, chronic diseases, cancers, and all sorts of parasites are all first detected when a physician manually recognises the given cell type in your blood sample.
“Yet, despite the critical nature of blood analysis to the medical industry – the process has hardly changed from its long, expensive form for 150 years: go to the doctor, get a large sample taken, wait for a couple days for a trained professional to analyse the blood, and then receive your report. Athelas changes all that.”
The designers say that their app means that a malaria test requires no expertise, takes a few seconds, and costs next to nothing. “All on a smartphone – holding the potential to save thousands of lives,” they add.
Athelas can also mimic the process conducted in lab-grade environments in rural areas through a system of predictive cell counting,
This means it can potentially benefit those in rural and suburban areas alike by providing faster and cheaper alternatives to existing diagnostic procedures.
In rural areas, the designers believe their tech will ‘really shine’ – providing previously unavailable diagnostic skills through the power of artificial intelligence and computer vision.
But experts warned of the difficulty of reproducing the quality of medical labs results using just a smartphone.
Speaking to the BBC, Dr Amar Safdar, the director of transplant medical diseases at New York University’s Langone Medical Center, says: “This app will create more confusion then alleviate anxiety. The major limitation for this approach is that most viruses require electron microscopic exams to see them.”
Dr Mike Chapman, of the University of Cambridge’s department of haematology, adds: “I’ve no problem with it in principle – but in reality, these need to be carefully calibrated around the right type of diseases.
“In a laboratory diagnosis, there is a lot of regulation that goes on behind the scenes to make sure that your results are meaningful.”
Ben Adams
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