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Detecting Pancreatic Cancer Using Selfies

저자:   업로드:2017-08-31  조회수:

    Perhaps all that narcissistic picture taking of oneself, which is seemingly so popular with smartphone users these days, can be put to effective use within the medical community, as researchers at the University of Washington (UW) have developed an app that could allow people to easily screen for pancreatic cancer and other diseases just by snapping a selfie.


    The new app, described in a paper published recently in the Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies in an article entitled “BiliScreen: Smartphone-Based Scleral Jaundice Monitoring for Liver and Pancreatic Disorders”, and is set to be presented to the public at the upcoming Ubicomp 2017, the Association for Computing Machinery's International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing.


    Pancreatic cancer has one of the worst prognoses, with a five-year survival rate of only 9%, in part because there are few revealing symptoms or noninvasive screening tools to catch a tumor before it spreads. One of the earliest symptoms of pancreatic cancer, as well as other diseases, is jaundice, a yellow discoloration of the skin and eyes caused by a buildup of bilirubin in the blood. The ability to detect signs of jaundice when bilirubin levels are minimally elevated, but before they're visible to the naked eye, could enable an entirely new screening program for at-risk individuals.




    "The problem with pancreatic cancer is that by the time you're symptomatic, it's frequently too late," explained lead author Alex Mariakakis, a doctoral student at the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at UW. "The hope is that if people can do this simple test once a month—in the privacy of their own homes—some might catch the disease early enough to undergo treatment that could save their lives."


    The new app, dubbed BiliScreen, uses a smartphone camera, computer vision algorithms, and machine-learning tools to detect increased bilirubin levels in a person's sclera, or the white part of the eye. In an initial clinical study of 70 people, the BiliScreen app, used in conjunction with a 3D printed box that controls the eye's exposure to light, correctly identified cases of concern 89.7% of the time, compared to the blood test currently used.


    "The eyes are a really interesting gateway into the body—tears can tell you how much glucose you have, sclera can tell you how much bilirubin is in your blood," noted senior study investigator Shwetak Patel, Ph.D., professor of computer science and engineering and electrical engineering at UW. "Our question was: Could we capture some of these changes that m

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