News Brief Archives
Home > News Briefs > Better Medicine Through Cell Phones
Cell phone image of simulated breast tumor.
Courtesy of Boris Rubinsky
Friday, May 2nd, 2008--
You use it to keep in touch while you’re out, but that cell phone in your pocket or purse could be the key to getting much-needed medical imaging technologies to large parts of the world where they are lacking today.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), three-quarters of the world’s population doesn’t have access to medical imaging—a routine part of healthcare for most of the developed (and insured) world. Even when medical imaging machines are donated to poorer countries, the WHO estimates that half the machines aren’t used because they need repair, maintenance, or a trained technician to run them.
Boris Rubinsky and his colleagues at the University of California Berkeley set out to find a solution to this problem and expand access to the life-saving technology. As Rubinsky--a bioengineering professor at UC Berkeley and the director of the Research Center for Bioengineering in the Service of Humanity and Society at Hebrew University in Jerusalem--explains it, medical imaging happens in three discrete steps. The first step is taking measurements from the patient with a piece of hardware--an ultrasound machine, for instance. Those measurements are fed into a powerful computer, which processes that raw data and produces an image. The image then gets displayed on a monitor so a doctor can make a diagnosis. Typically, all of that happens in one big, expensive stand-alone machine.
What Rubinsky and his colleagues did is separate those components—data acquisition, data processing, and data display—using cell phone technology. That means only the medical imaging hardware—that ultrasound machine from the example above—needs to be with the patient. The bigger, more expensive and complicated computer that crunches the data, can be far away in some industrialized country with trained technicians and support, with the cell phone connecting the two machines.
Rubinksy put this new medical imaging system to the test trying to detect a simulated breast tumor with an imaging technology called electrical impedance tomography (EIT). EIT makes a map of a tissue’s physical properties based on differences in electrical resistance within the tissue. Electrodes inject electrical currents into the target breast tissue and a machine measures the voltages around the tissue. Those voltages are fed into a computer that produces a map of the breast tissue. Because a tumor conducts electricity differently than the surrounding normal tissue, it will stand out from the surrounding tissue on the resulting image.
Rubinsky used a simple, inexpensive device—similar to one that could be operated and maintained at a rural clinic—to take the voltage measurements from the simulated breast tissue. And here’s where the cell phone comes in. That data gathering device was connected to a cell phone, which then sent that raw data as a text message to the central processing computer. The message was small—about 4 kilobytes—because it’s just a list of numbers representing the voltage measurements.
Once that remote computer crunched those numbers to produce the map of the simulated breast and tumor tissue, it sent the image to the cell phone, the same way you would send a photo. The resulting image represented both the breast tissue and the tumor, so a doctor looking at the photo, says Rubinsky, would be able to detect the tumor. He or she could even use the cell phone to manipulate the image--for example, zooming in on the tumor. And that image, in addition to being sent to a doctor at a rural clinic, could also be viewed by a doctor at the central processing location, to help make a diagnosis.
The cell phone-medical imaging model is ready for widespread use, says Rubinsky, because cell phone access is so widespread, even in developing parts of the world. It will work best, he emphasizes, with medical imaging systems that use a fairly simple measurement device, such as ultrasound or EIT. The system won’t work as well for MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) because the machines are simply too big.
This research is out in the April 30th issue of PLoS (Public Library of Science) One.
--Karin Vergoth
Boris Rubinsky
Distinguished Professor of Bioengineering at the University of California Berkeley
Director of the Research Center for Bioengineering in the Service of Humanity and Society at Hebrew University in Jerusalem
SciFri File: Genetic Testing for Breast and Ovarian Cancer
A company is mass-marketing a genetic test for breast and ovarian cancer. Would you get tested?
Future of Phones
There are plenty of options for placing a call from point A to point B, with more arriving on the market every day. In this segment, Ira and guests try to sort out the future of phones. Will Google's entry into cell phone software simplify the market?
Digital TV Transition
What's going on with the transition to digital television -- and will you need to adjust your sets?
Print
Mail