April 16, 2009
Mobile Phone Diagnosis Approaches Field Trials
Two innovative devices that use modified mobile phone technology to diagnose disease now have funds for more research and field tests in developing countries.
The 'CelloPhone' and the 'CellScope', diagnostic imaging tools made from everyday camera phones, were winners of this year's Vodafone Americas Foundation Wireless Innovation Project prize.
A research team from UCLA will use existing collaborative networks to carry out trials using CelloPhone at large hospitals in Africa, South America and South Asia. CelloPhone loads samples of blood, urine or other bodily fluids into a modified mobile phone. The images are captured using a special light source and the phone's camera, and then sent by multimedia message to a central station, from where a computer program returns a diagnosis as a text message. The system could also record data for epidemiological studies.
Another device called CellScope is being developed by a team from University of California, Berkeley, evaluates field-ready prototypes to diagnose malaria and tuberculosis. CellScope harnesses traditional optical microscopy, clipping a small microscope onto a camera phone, then sending the captured image for diagnosis. CelloPhone works by interpreting the 'shadows' of cells.
The devices should help rural medicine, where health clinics cannot afford conventional microscopy or sending samples away for analysis. The Cellscope is inexpensive because it uses the phone's own electronics, additional components would cost around US$5-10 for each device. The team is testing how accurately CelloPhone diagnoses diseases like malaria, HIV and tuberculosis, and believe that they are "very close" to a commercial hematology analyzer that costs around $60,000-100,000.
The researchers believe that the technologies are promising as mobile phone systems are so widespread in developing countries however, a roll-out of remote diagnosis could be difficult, since clinicians are used to diagnosing patients in person. There is also the challenges of cost control and the infrastructure needed for remote diagnosis that must be considered.
The development teams also point out that the devices must also be field-tested against current 'gold standards' to be of real value.
Source: SciDev.net
Posted by rsk at April 16, 2009 12:22 PM