janrinok writes "A cheap device, when fastened to a smartphone, will enable people to receive specialist eye diagnoses in remote locations, which will assist local medical personnel in providing the appropriate treatment without the expense and time of sending the patient to visit an opthalmic specialist.
Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have developed two inexpensive adapters that enable a smartphone to capture high-quality images of the front and back of the eye. The adapters make it easy for anyone with minimal training to take a picture of the eye and share it securely with other health practitioners or store it in the patient's electronic record.
'Think Instagram for the eye,' said one of the developers, assistant professor of ophthalmology Robert Chang, MD.
The researchers see this technology as an opportunity to increase access to eye-care services as well as to improve the ability to advise on patient care remotely."
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 08 2014, @11:42PM
This device is amazing, even more amazing considering it was developed by two men who look like they can barely see out of their own eyes.
(Score: 1, Funny) by ground on Sunday March 09 2014, @01:01AM
(Score: 2) by mrbluze on Sunday March 09 2014, @03:55AM
They only look like that to you cause you can barely see then yourself!
Do it yourself, 'cause no one else will do it yourself.
(Score: -1, Troll) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday March 09 2014, @02:19AM
Silicon Valley Eye Physicians in Sunnyvale, just off 101, not far from Yahoo and in the same strip mall with the big AMC Theatres as well as Microcenter [microcenter.com]
The opthalmologist recommended I pay for the photo to use as a "baseline", not so much to detect the presence of cancer, but to compare with photos taken during subsequent exams, so that the two could be compared.
The first symptom of many kinds of cancer that occur where one can see them with one's own eyes is that the appearance of something changes, quite commonly in a very subtle way.
A close friend of mine is as pale as a ghost, has blonde hair and lots of moles. If you are that way too, or like myself you have any significant birthmarks, look into how to self-diagnose Melanoma.
It took me a long time to clue in to how Melanoma could be one of the very deadliest cancers. In my case, the birthmark on my lower leg would change color or shape, but just subtly so.
If I do not then get me to a pathologist, I am an ex-parrot.
It's not that my birthmark would kill me, but that Melanoma cells just love to swim about in the bloodstream, that is, to Metastasize. I don't know why but my guess is that they are not tightly bound to their colleagues.
"Benign Tumours", which are commonly removed surgically, are in reality "Benign Cancers". That is, their cells really do reproduce without bound just as Malignant cells do, but in the case of my ex-wife's Benign Thyroid Cancer, which resulted in the photo for her student ID card showing a bulge on one side of her throat the size of a golf ball (!), her Cancer was "encapsulated".
That is, her tumour had a smooth surface and there was a clear boundary between the tumour and her other tissues, so that she, her surgeon and her oncologist could be certain that all the cancer cells had been removed, after surgically extracting her golf ball.
IIRC there are five different types of Thyroid Cancer. Four of them are easy to survive. The fifth is not encapsulated; they call it cancer because Malignant Tumours resemble actual crabs.
The reason one always needs a biopsy before one can start treatment, is that the treatments for some cancers are completely ineffective for others.
In the case of Thyroid Cancer, that fifth type is highly malignant. A while back a US Supreme Court Justice got that fifth type and was dead just a few months later. In the case of that fifth type, I don't think there is anything that medicine can do even to prolong one's life just a little, so Bonita was pissing nickels until her biopsy came back.
The difference between US and Canadian Medicine - as well as Obamacare! - is that at the time, she was a starving student. Her exams, biopsy, surgery, surgical recovery, every six months a Thyroid Hormone test by an Endocrinologist, her room at the hospital in Halifax, she did not have to pay one red cent.
She is still alive and doing just fine seventeen years after she puzzled over the strange question as to why she was up to her ankles in hot water immediately after washing what were at one time her long, delicate luxuriously curly locks.
If all of your hair falls out all at the same time, then you either have Thyroid cancer or the Nuclear Power Plant down the road just dumped coolant into your Perierre.
In my own case, I have some reason to believe that my having visible hair loss at the age of fourteen - one can easily see my receding hairline in my school yearbook photos - going on to be as bald as a bowling ball at twenty-one, is due to my spilling mercury all over my living room carpet at the age of twelve. Mercury is profoundly toxic, evaporates readly, with its vapor being colorless, odorless and tasteless.
The Metastasization of apparently-insignificant skin tumours had the eventual result that my beloved, precious, gentle, quiet and shy but white-as-the-driven-snow cat Pishi - Persian (Farsi) for "Kitty" eventually succumbed to bone cancer in her skull as a result of the white fur on her ears being ineffective at blocking the Sun's Ultraviolet.
This despite her vet surgically removing both her ears after spotting some small brown dots around the edges of each of them. None of those spots were anywhere near her skull, but even so they had already Metastasized.
Pishi died in my arms about five years later as I sat in ver vet's waiting room intending to put her to sleep.
All opthalmologists as well as some optometrists recommend that you permit them to dilate your pupils so they can visually examine your retina with a bright light and a magnifying device.
You ALWAYS should request dilation, however it is moderately painful and dilates your pupils so much that the noonday sun looks like nuclear war has broken out all over everywhere. It also makes your vision uncomfortably blurry for a few years.
I don't recall what I paid for that digital retinal photo at Silly Valley Eye Physicians but it was like a hundred dollars or so.
The reason I was down with paying that much, with the expectation that I would pay again the next time I needed new specs, was a passage I read back in the day, in Cliff Stoll's most-excellent paperback, The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage [google.com].
If you have yet to read The Cuckoo's Egg, then you have no business being root on a box that's not in a locked room that no one other than yourself has the key too, as well as not being connected in any way to anything outside that room.
Consider Edward Snowden: not long ago, a civilian coworker lost his NSA clearance after having admitted to lending his login credentials to Snowden. A military officer was also caught out somehow. I don't recall what that officer stands accused of. The result of Eddie-Baby, his coworker and that officer is that Eddie made off to Hong Kong with six full-disk encrypted notebooks full of newspaper headlines.
I once had the most amazing, hour-long phone call with a potential volume customer and custom software development client who was cool to tell me his first name but no more.
"Any chance you could enable Working Printlogger to log to a server, and in such a way that the end-user could not possibly defeat it? We also need a foolproof Working Printstamper."
While child's play on *NIX, Working Software made bank on Toner Tuner, Working Watermarker, Working Printlogger and Working Printstamper because I knew all about how to write a virus for Mac OS System 7.
Funny that: each of our "virus-like hacks" sold for $19.95 or so.
Toner Tuner allowed the user to print any document in an adjustable greyscale, so as to use less ink or toner for drafts. Working Watermarker was our top-seller for a couple of years, as it enabled you to put your logo on your business letters, as if printed on letterhead, as well as a greyscale watermark that the user designed then imported into the UI. Working Printlogger wrote into a text file in the System Folder the same kind of stuff that a *NIX print spooler writes into /var/log; Working Printstamper printed that same log entry at the bottom of each printed page.
"I'm not real sure but I'm happy to look into it. Why do you need foolproof logging and stamping of your prints?"
"I'm sorry I really am but I am not at liberty to explain."
Heh.
My Dad had a Top Secret clearance with the US Navy. By the time I was in fifth grade, I knew what all the classifications were all the way from Sensitive to Top Secret, what they were used for as well as why, what a "Compartment" was, as well as what "Need To Know Meant".
Let's just say that someone dropped the ball a couple times: neither Bradley Manning nor Edward Snowden were in the Compartments required to obtain the documents they each put the arm on, even had they the required clearances AS WELL AS The Need To Know each secret to have any hope of making their deliverables.
Suppose you and I each work for Lockheed, and we are both designing a new model of Intercontinental Ballistic Missile so as to get Vladimir off of Ukraine's back.
If you are designing the reentry vehicle, and I am designing the rockets, then you Need To Know all manner of secrets about ablative coatings, ultrasonic fluid flow and the like.
I too need to know all about ultrasonic fluid flow, but quite a different kind than you do. I do not need to know about ablative coatings, but I do need to know about Cryogenics as well as extremely strong metal allows that all have very high melting points.
Back in the day, the Military, NSA, CIA, the Diplomatic Community and all were quite diligent about preventing me from ever learning about ablative coatings, as well as preventing you from learning about the kinds of alloys that one makes rocket engines out of, but to the great delight of The Guardian, those days were long ago.
The best this potential volume customer could come up with, was that there was only one printer in the entire facility, it was in a locked room all by itself, and that the entire room was under the continuous watch of several video cameras.
In the end I came up with all manner of ways that someone who knew all about Mac OS code could defeat all that other manner of ways I could come up with in attempting to prevent them from doing so.
Cliff Stoll was I think a UC Berkeley astronomy grad student who worked as a UNIX Sysadmin at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, up in the Berkeley Hills overlooking the campus.
That part of the hill is quite step, the Lawrence Berkeley lab isn't very big so everyone gets to work on a shuttle bus.
Somehow Stoll clues in to that someone has busted in to his box, so he tracks the intruder down to that intruder's bedroom in his family's home somewhere in West Germany, however the legal authorities refuse to prosecute because at that time, there weren't any laws anywhere that forbid one to crack into a computer!
I don't recall when or where it was, but my understanding is that the very first successful prosecution for logging into a computer without authorization, got the perpetrator a symbolic slap on the hand for STEALING ELECTRICITY!
Stoll said that he tried very, very hard to look happy and interested, when Retinal Cancer patients quite cheerfully and proudly announced that they were volunteers for an experimental radiation treatment, in which the LBL particle accellerators were used to shoot Pion beams directly through their eyes into their tumours.
Pions are somewhat massive - a Quark and an Antiquark IIRC, so they have two-thirds of the Mass of a Neutron or Proton - they also decay quite quickly.
The hope was to arrange things such that the Pions would all decay in or near the Retinal Tumours, thereby bombing the tumours back to the stone age without killing too many non-cancerous cells or actually causing NEW cancers.
I don't think that experiment ever made it even to an FDA application.
In my understanding, if you have Retinal Cancer, your ONLY hope of survival is to have your eyeball, a good chunk of your optic nerve and probably the inside of your eyesocket surgically removed, followed by a bracing course of Chemotherapy.
This because, once a tumour is big enough to so much as suspect the need for a biopsy, the chances are quite good that it has already metastasized, as with my beloved Pishi.
(Pishi hated Bonita with a furious passion though, because Bonita brought her dog same into our home. Don't ever think animals don't have emotions!)
Cancers are quite commonly very, very slow-growing. It happens all the time, that one single cosmic ray particle scatters off the wrong particle in the wrong part of your DNA, and you die in horrible agony thirty years later of Pancreatic Cancer!
OK so diagnosing Melanoma:
Kids, don't try this at home, I'm not really a doctor, I just play one on Soylentnews:
If you have any moles, freckles, birthmarks or little clumps of thick, long body hair, from time to time examine them carefully, or have a friend or family member do so.
If any of them ever change color in any way, especially if that color change is only a part of your mole &c and not the whole thing, if it changes shape in any way, then consult your doctor to request she examine it.
There are two other things to look for but my memory, as always, is hazy.
My pale, blonde speckled friend, after having a melanoma surgically removed - fortunately before it metastasized as she knew to be on the lookout - her oncologist informed her that if one EVER suffered Melanoma, one was guaranteed to get it AGAIN during one's lifetime.
So the oncologist gave her a pamphlet, maybe fifty pages long, full of high-rez, closeup color photos of all manner of moles, birthmarks, clumps of thick, long body hair and the like.
Each such photo had a caption, all just one word: "Normal", "Melanoma", "Benign" and the like.
The reason for her being given that book, as well it is so CRUCIALLY important to get regular visual inspections if you are pale, blonde or have lots of moles, birthmarks or clumps of body hair, is that I myself was COMPLETELY unable to diagnose any of those photos without actually reading their captions.
This led me to conceive of an automated Melanoma diagnostic test:
The patient strips naked, steps into a booth the size of an Olde Skool payphone booth, then is photographed all over their entire body, even the soles of their feet through the glass floor of the booth.
This because another close friend died in the most horrible way, after failing to catch what would otherwise have been an easily survivable cancer that was on her Perineum.
Your Perineum is immediately between your Junk or, in her case, her Promised Land, and your Cornhole. I expect her partner could have spotted it had she looked there, but the two of them tended to do the dirty in their darkened bedroom.
I visited about a month before she passed.
She was completely insane. While she appeared conscious, she was quite clearly and quite vividly hallucinating and profoundly delusional. Her partner, a close friend of mine and Bonita's, was the most amazing caregiver. Imagine your wife, husband, mother, father and child writhing and convulsion in excruciating pain, otherwise completely unaware of you or their surroundings, but you greet them cheerfully, find some way to give them tasty nutritious food and drink, then hop in bed and hold them for the rest of their night. I actually saw our friend do just that for her partner.
I expect my phone booth idea would work well however it would be expensive. I also expect that the ones who need that kind of skin exam the very most, would be shy about having the bottoms of their lungs snapped through the soles of their feet.
This eventually led to my idea for a Mobile App: snap photos of all the moles, birthmarks and hair clumps all over your body.
In part, automated pattern recognition would try to spot cancers based on their colors and the like, but that's hard to get right.
More reliable, is that each such photo would be compared to previous photos of the same spots. It's a lot easier to detect differences between two photos, than to intelligibly interpret any one photo.
I, Michael David Crawford [warplife.com], hereby disclaim all interest to each and every invention herein described.
One.
Last.
Word.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 09 2014, @03:15AM
It warms the heart to see another way that cheap ubiquitous computing is improving people's lives. Applications like this will raise the impact of existing trained doctors and improve health worldwide.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Thexalon on Sunday March 09 2014, @07:17AM
As it turns out, Futurama [imdb.com] already covered this exact scenario.
Every task is easy if somebody else is doing it.
(Score: 1) by Marneus68 on Monday March 10 2014, @04:30AM
I don't remember the exact episode you might be referring to.