Smartphone device may help diagnose cancer
- April 23, 2015, 11:44 am
- Breaking News
- 37 Views
HQ City Desk
QUETTA: A new device that can be added to a smartphone may be able to accurately and cheaply diagnose cancer, a technology which could be useful in remote areas, US researchers said Monday.
Known as D3, the add-on is designed to be used by medical experts, not the general public, and so far appears as accurate as more involved and costly tests in current use, but at a price of a mere $1.80 per patient.
The research is described in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a peer-reviewed US journal.
"We believe the platform we have developed provides essential features at an extraordinary low cost," said co-author Cesar Castro, a doctor at the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center and Center for Systems Biology.
D3 stands for digital diffraction diagnosis, and the system "features an imaging module with a battery-powered LED light clipped onto a standard smartphone that records high-resolution imaging data with its camera," said the study.
"With a much greater field of view than traditional microscopy, the D3 system is capable of recording data on more than 100,000 cells from a blood or tissue sample in a single image."
The process involves adding microbeads to a sample of blood or tissue. The microbeads bind to known cancer-related molecules. The sample is then loaded into the D3 imaging module.
That data can be quickly sent via a secure, encrypted cloud service to a processing server.
