Malaria has a new enemy – the Smartphone
The Lifelens software uses a smartphone to detect Malaria (Image credit: http://thelifelensproject.com)
A team of researchers has developed an application which can turn a smartphone into a malaria busting marvel. Each year, the mosquito-borne parasite kills approximately 781,000 people (2.23% of deaths) worldwide. Ninety percent of malaria-related deaths occur in sub-Saharan Africa, and of those, the majority (85%) are children under five years old.
A team of scientists and developers, attempting to win the Imagine Cup held by Microsoft, has developed a Smartphone app which will allow people to test for the deadly disease in a matter of minutes. The group, calling themselves LifeLens, says in a video and article available on their blog that “Lifelens hopes to directly address the major problem of reducing child mortality rates throughout the world by providing a robust mobile diagnostic solution for malaria patients. The premise of Lifelens project is to digitally characterize anemia, visualize blood cell rupture and parasites, and provide three-dimensional modeling of cells through single image acquisition of low-volume blood smears by peripheral finger pricks.”
The most common diagnostic tool being used in sub-Saharan Africa is the Rapid Diagnostic Test (RDT), a cotton swab treated with a reactive agent which changes colour when it is exposed to infected blood. Unfortunately, the RDT swab also changes colour for a number of unrelated reasons. The RDT is, as a result, highly unreliable giving false-positive results 60% of the time. Every person who receives a positive result is treated with artemisinin-based combination treatment (ACT), the people who are falsely diagnosed because of the faulty RDT are taking a treatment which they do not need. This is not only a waste of valuable medicine, it is also increasing resistance to AZT, making the treatment less effective.
Lifelens replaces the unreliable cotton swab with a high definition, high magnification camera, equipped with proprietary image analysis algorithm written in .NET with Visual Studio. The software is designed to be used on the Windows Phone 7 OS.
“Diagnosis is conducted using proprietary computer vision algorithms, written in C#, which can detect the presence of a malarial parasite within a patient’s blood cells. There are future plans to include Windows Azure into the system for data aggregation and reporting.” says the Lifelens website.
The Lifelens diagnostic process consists of five steps (which can be performed by a volunteer in the field with only basic training):
1. Draw blood
2. Place on slide to create smear
3. Image with Lifelens
4. Receive diagnosis and SMS export to server
5. Disinfect slide
“With such a straightforward process, Lifelens can be used by anyone who has the ability to operate basic cell phones. This opens up the possibilities of even shipping devices directly to afflicted areas as no special training or language skills are necessary for the operation of the device. In this way we seek to offer lower cost care to a much broader spectrum of the world’s population than what can currently be served by blood analysis labs or rapid diagnostic tests.” says the Lifelens website.
By Angela Meadon
References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaria
http://www.who.int/malaria/world_malaria_report_2010/en/index.html
