Cell phones as diagnostic tools in areas without ultrasound & X-Ray machines via Book of Joe.
A professor of bioengineering at the University of California, Berkeley and his colleagues have developed a cheaper way to perform medical imaging using a cellular phone.
Boris Rubinsky’s team has developed a portable medical scanner that can be plugged into a cellular phone, which transmits raw ultrasound or X-ray scanning data to a remote computer processor. The computer then converts the data to images and relays these back for viewing on the cell phone screen.
More:
Engineers harness cell phone technology for use in medical imaging & video.
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This is an imaging tool which uses a cell phone as it’s communication link, it doesn’t use the cell phone as an imaging too.
It’s as stupid as the article about a bandaid fuel cell that was posted here.
Hey, I have a car that fits on my keychain and goes in my pocket. Read my article for details (the details being it’s the key which, by starting the car, lets me drive wherever a normal car can drive).
This may have been an interesting article, but the presentation here is disgustingly stupid.
OK, they out-source the only part of the system that can not break. They outsource the software for image processing.
CPU power cannot be the problem as they already do have a mobile phone in the chain. They could just use that phone as a computer.
Well a simple x-ray does not need processing and CT and MRI scanners are expensive with or without processing. So other than the impedance based tomography system they used as a demonstrator how can this be used? It’s a good idea to create some form of central processing system but they have not really done anything spectacular in terms of hardware and I don’t see how it improves access to medical imaging at the moment.
“Raw Ultrasound”
Uh, what?
The key line in the article was:
“Traditional ultrasound and X-ray machines are bulky because their components consist of a computer, video monitor and scanner. These are also very expensive; an ultrasound machine costs about $70,000 while a portable scanner will only cost $1,000.”
Really, I think this is more about creating the portable SCANNER and the system that works with the cell phone, rather than the cellphone link itself. That’s the interesting part. The Make blog post didn’t really explain why this was so interesting.