House Calls From Worlds Away

May 04, 2008

In addition to looking for interesting green technology, I'll be keeping an eye out for ideas that help impoverished parts of the world. In many places, cell phones are allowing people with limited resources to develop successful businesses, connect with microfinance opportunities, and even send news dispatches. Now this little device could help detect tumors.

This week researchers from UC Berkeley and Hebrew University of Jerusalem announced that they had figured out a way to transmit sophisticated medical imaging from a simple device to cell phones, eliminating the need for expensive stand-alone equipment.

"Diagnosis and treatment of an estimated 20 percent of diseases would benefit from medical imaging," Professor Boris Rubinsky of Hebrew University of Jerusalem said in a press release about the research. "Yet this advancement has been out of reach for millions of people in the world because the equipment is too costly to maintain."

Here's how it works: A patient comes into a doctor's office in a far-flung area and the doctor does a scan with a simplified device called a "data acquisition device" or DAD. Unlike the systems that are currently on-site, the DADs don't have sophisticated image displays and don't require extensive training to use. Then the scan data is transmitted via cell phone to a centralized location that has all the hardware and software to reconstruct the image. At this centralized place, which the researchers say could be anywhere, the image is processed. It's then sent back to the doctor's office, where it appears on a phone screen (image at right).

Maybe after that the good doctor could text with all-clear results if the patient had to travel far to get to the clinic.

Photo Credit: Prof. Boris Rubinsky/Hebrew University of Jerusalem