Medical photo sharing app could change the world
Published 4:00 am, Sunday, June 19, 2011
Silicon Valley can't get enough of mobile apps that allow users to share photos, as venture capitalists compete to jam tens of millions of dollars into the space.
Instagram, Daily Booth, Color, Path and other copycats have raised close to $100 million in recent months, clearly heralding a paradigm shift in the distribution of drunken evening and dinner entree pics.
Meanwhile, a photo sharing service of an altogether different sort is emerging from the labs at UC Berkeley.
A team led by Bioengineering Professor Daniel Fletcher has developed a small, inexpensive microscope called CellScope that attaches to mobile phone cameras to snap magnified pictures of blood and phlegm slides. The images can then be "shared" as texts or e-mails with modern medical facilities miles or continents away, which can accurately identify diseases and even spot early warning signs of pandemics.
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Two key differences from today's hip photo apps: CellScope has only raised about $500,000 in grants and there's a chance it might actually change the world.
Mobile microscopy addresses several critical challenges in tackling tuberculosis, malaria and other blood-borne diseases that kill millions of people every year: The clinics, doctors and aid workers who reach into isolated parts of the third world often don't have the equipment or expertise to identify these diseases, so they can't begin to know how to treat them.
"There are doctors who can diagnose this, they just aren't where the patients are," said Fletcher, also a faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Put simply: CellScope can erase the distance and delays that cost lives.
It began as a hypothetical question in Fletcher's optics class several years ago: If you were trekking through Africa and stumbled on a disease outbreak in a remote village, how could you diagnose the problem with the stuff in your backpack?
First to design tool
The obvious starting point was taking advantage of the technology and optics already packed into the average cell phone. In fact, it was so obvious that Fletcher assumed someone else had already developed an accompanying microscope. To his surprise, no one had, so he funded a summer project to design and build the tool.
Because of the simple interface of the Apple iPhone, they've mainly focused on developing CellScope around that platform for now. But it can easily be adjusted to work with other handsets and operating systems, as long as the cameras have sufficient resolution.
The custom iPhone software allows the user to manipulate an image as in any other app, with swipes and two-fingered zooming.
As this columnist tinkered with the app in Fletcher's Stanley Hall office late last week, on an iPod Touch affixed to the cream-colored CellScope, a cluster of red blood cells came into sharp focus. They were mostly soft and round but a few had the rough, angular shape that's a telltale sign of malaria.
The team is beginning to figure out ways to automate disease diagnosis with the software, potentially offering near immediate results and lowering the level of expertise needed on the ground. Ideally, however, the conclusion would still be confirmed by a remote expert.
By piggybacking on the falling prices of mobile phones, Fletcher believes they can produce the devices for half the price of standard field microscopes. Those usually run around $2,000 today.
So far, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Blum Center for Developing Economies, Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society, Vodafone Americas Foundation, Microsoft Research and Intel have provided backing for the project.
CellScope is now at a critical juncture, however. The technology clearly works, but the real test is figuring out if it can be implemented in the real world. That will require: cranking out the devices on a larger scale, putting them into the hands of remote clinics, training local personnel to use them, securing buy-in from governments and connecting with medical facilities willing to perform remote diagnosis.
Venture capital needed
"These are enormous challenges," Fletcher acknowledged.
And expensive ones. He's in the process of applying for additional grants, as team members prepare for limited test runs in Vietnam and India.
Perhaps the venture capital community, which speaks so often and eloquently about the transformative power of technology, should consider putting more money behind something truly worth transforming.
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