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We already carry a highly sophisticated camera in our pockets. How long before we can leverage a smart phone to become the tricorder Star Trek had always promi

We already carry a highly sophisticated camera in our pockets. How long before we can leverage a smart phone to become the tricorder Star Trek had always promised? Apple Watch looks to be promising, and I imagine a world where humans won’t have to visit a doctor for a diagnosis, but rather to confirm, and walk a patient through a successful treatment plan

ekianjo 3y ago
Expect doctors and the related industries and bodies like the useless FDA to fight hard against that. As usual.
- xwdv 3y ago
  They already do. Any time you start talking about wanting to do exploratory analysis for preventative reasons they’ll react in some way like “Hurr hurr whoa there buddy, you don’t want to get yourself anxious over benign stuff! This will do more harm than good!”
  - lostlogin 3y ago
    People Googling their symptoms and treatments undoubtedly does cause anxiety and correcting mistaken impressions does cost clinical time. There is a middle road here somewhere - we just have to find it, or accept the costs that come with having more tools.
    - ekianjo 3y ago
      There is anxiety because information is locked away by companies and regulators. They do zero efforts to help the public understand anything.
      - JimtheCoder 3y ago
        "They do zero efforts to help the public understand anything." To be fair, with complex diseases, the experts don't even understand them fully... Trying to explain something super complex with incomplete knowledge to most humans, who often don't have even a basic understanding of how biological systems work, seems like a bad idea...
        ekianjo 3y ago
        Just explain what we know and dont know. People will become a lot more charitable when you do the effort.
  - rincebrain 3y ago
    Doctors are, in my experience, very good at justifying preventative checks they thought of and very poor at justifying ones you thought of. In both cases, they're correct - since no intervention is risk free, even if you have a 0% false positive rate in the sense of "I found a mass in your arm", for example, you might still have a worse outcome rate if the rate of "mass in your arm causes harm" is lower than "complications from removing mass in your arm". That's not to say that their suggestions are right and yours are wrong, just that they're right about the reasoning but tend to dismiss concerns that they didn't think of and justify ones they did, and we need a more complicated basis for justifying this than "I think".
xnx 3y ago
Google has worked on using smartphones for: measuring heart rate, identifying skin conditions, detecting disease through pictures of the eye, and as a type of stethoscope: https://ai.googleblog.com/2023/02/google-research-2022-beyond-health.html#:~:text=Shift%20towards%20mobile%20medicine https://ai.googleblog.com/2023/02/google-research-2022-beyon...
toomuchtodo 3y ago
For the developing world, this is likely a great option [1] [2] (although you need to account for additional optics for a smartphone ["fundus camera"]). For the developed world, it's likely this gets lumped into a traditional eye exam. The benefit is from squeezing more data out of existing imaging encounters using ML; think about these as data pipeline implementations. > High-resolution images of the retina are now a routine part of eye care – in particular, a type of 3D scan known as ‘optical coherence tomography’ (OCT), which is widely used in eye clinics and high-street opticians. In less than a minute, an OCT scan produces a cross-section of the retina (the back of the eye) in incredible detail – down to a thousandth of a millimetre. [1] https://www.cureus.com/articles/106024-effective-low-cost-ophthalmological-screening-with-a-novel-iphone-fundus-camera-at-community-centers https://www.cureus.com/articles/106024-effective-low-cost-op... [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5609317/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5609317/
- amluto 3y ago
  I don’t see an iPhone or similar device getting OCT-like images anytime soon. They need special optics to image the whole retina (although I can imagine image processing hacks to work around that at the expense of exam speed), but they also require an optical system that’s quite unlike a normal camera to acquire an image at all. I think the real issue with OCT cost is machine utilization. An OCT machine is cheap as medical devices go, but, in the usual US model, it gets extremely low utilization. It takes a minute or so to get a scan, it’s completely painless and requires neither dilation or any particular expertise, but the machines only get used a couple times a day. A venue like Costco or a comparably busy place in a different country could probably offer walk-up OCT scanning for a couple dollars or maybe even free and encourage people to do it once per year. If the FDA played along, software could likely analyze the images and detect the progression of quite a few diseases, several of which would be treatable. (A brand new machine seems to cost something like $20k. If it gets used 60 times per day (credible for a large scale user but not for a small shop), $1 of revenue per scan gives an adequate payback.)
  - paulmd 3y ago
    > I don’t see an iPhone or similar device getting OCT-like images anytime soon. They need special optics to image the whole retina (although I can imagine image processing hacks to work around that at the expense of exam speed), but they also require an optical system that’s quite unlike a normal camera to acquire an image at all. the star trek tricorder had attachments, for example the medical tricorder had an additional module and a detachable hand scanner. https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Medical_tricorder#24th_century https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Medical_tricorder#24th_... the cellphone as the basis for the processing of various sensors, delivering software and connectivity, is essentially similar to this idea. Like when you have a thermal camera that connects to your cellphone.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

ekianjo 3y ago

Expect doctors and the related industries and bodies like the useless FDA to fight hard against that. As usual.

xwdv 3y ago
They already do. Any time you start talking about wanting to do exploratory analysis for preventative reasons they’ll react in some way like “Hurr hurr whoa there buddy, you don’t want to get yourself anxious over benign stuff! This will do more harm than good!”
- lostlogin 3y ago
  People Googling their symptoms and treatments undoubtedly does cause anxiety and correcting mistaken impressions does cost clinical time. There is a middle road here somewhere - we just have to find it, or accept the costs that come with having more tools.
  - ekianjo 3y ago
    There is anxiety because information is locked away by companies and regulators. They do zero efforts to help the public understand anything.
    - JimtheCoder 3y ago
      "They do zero efforts to help the public understand anything." To be fair, with complex diseases, the experts don't even understand them fully... Trying to explain something super complex with incomplete knowledge to most humans, who often don't have even a basic understanding of how biological systems work, seems like a bad idea...
      - ekianjo 3y ago
        Just explain what we know and dont know. People will become a lot more charitable when you do the effort.
- rincebrain 3y ago
  Doctors are, in my experience, very good at justifying preventative checks they thought of and very poor at justifying ones you thought of. In both cases, they're correct - since no intervention is risk free, even if you have a 0% false positive rate in the sense of "I found a mass in your arm", for example, you might still have a worse outcome rate if the rate of "mass in your arm causes harm" is lower than "complications from removing mass in your arm". That's not to say that their suggestions are right and yours are wrong, just that they're right about the reasoning but tend to dismiss concerns that they didn't think of and justify ones they did, and we need a more complicated basis for justifying this than "I think".

xnx 3y ago

Google has worked on using smartphones for: measuring heart rate, identifying skin conditions, detecting disease through pictures of the eye, and as a type of stethoscope: https://ai.googleblog.com/2023/02/google-research-2022-beyond-health.html#:~:text=Shift%20towards%20mobile%20medicine https://ai.googleblog.com/2023/02/google-research-2022-beyon...

toomuchtodo 3y ago

For the developing world, this is likely a great option [1] [2] (although you need to account for additional optics for a smartphone ["fundus camera"]). For the developed world, it's likely this gets lumped into a traditional eye exam. The benefit is from squeezing more data out of existing imaging encounters using ML; think about these as data pipeline implementations. > High-resolution images of the retina are now a routine part of eye care – in particular, a type of 3D scan known as ‘optical coherence tomography’ (OCT), which is widely used in eye clinics and high-street opticians. In less than a minute, an OCT scan produces a cross-section of the retina (the back of the eye) in incredible detail – down to a thousandth of a millimetre. [1] https://www.cureus.com/articles/106024-effective-low-cost-ophthalmological-screening-with-a-novel-iphone-fundus-camera-at-community-centers https://www.cureus.com/articles/106024-effective-low-cost-op... [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5609317/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5609317/

amluto 3y ago
I don’t see an iPhone or similar device getting OCT-like images anytime soon. They need special optics to image the whole retina (although I can imagine image processing hacks to work around that at the expense of exam speed), but they also require an optical system that’s quite unlike a normal camera to acquire an image at all. I think the real issue with OCT cost is machine utilization. An OCT machine is cheap as medical devices go, but, in the usual US model, it gets extremely low utilization. It takes a minute or so to get a scan, it’s completely painless and requires neither dilation or any particular expertise, but the machines only get used a couple times a day. A venue like Costco or a comparably busy place in a different country could probably offer walk-up OCT scanning for a couple dollars or maybe even free and encourage people to do it once per year. If the FDA played along, software could likely analyze the images and detect the progression of quite a few diseases, several of which would be treatable. (A brand new machine seems to cost something like $20k. If it gets used 60 times per day (credible for a large scale user but not for a small shop), $1 of revenue per scan gives an adequate payback.)
- paulmd 3y ago
  > I don’t see an iPhone or similar device getting OCT-like images anytime soon. They need special optics to image the whole retina (although I can imagine image processing hacks to work around that at the expense of exam speed), but they also require an optical system that’s quite unlike a normal camera to acquire an image at all. the star trek tricorder had attachments, for example the medical tricorder had an additional module and a detachable hand scanner. https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Medical_tricorder#24th_century https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Medical_tricorder#24th_... the cellphone as the basis for the processing of various sensors, delivering software and connectivity, is essentially similar to this idea. Like when you have a thermal camera that connects to your cellphone.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]