A University of California, Berkeley team is researching how to enable people in areas where medical imaging equipment isn’t available locally to benefit from the technology instead via cell phones.
“Medical imaging is something we take for granted in industrialized countries,” said Boris Rubinsky, UC Berkeley professor of bioengineering and mechanical engineering and head of the team that developed this new application for cell phones, in a statement. “Imaging is considered one of the most important achievements in modern medicine. Diagnosis and treatment of an estimated 20 percent of diseases would benefit from medical imaging, yet this advancement has been out of reach for millions of people in the world because the equipment is too costly to maintain. Our system would make imaging technology inexpensive and accessible for these underserved populations.”
Rubinsky’s team has come up with a way that cell phones can transmit raw data from the location of a patient to a central location where an image can be processed and zipped back to the cell phone for viewing on its screen (see simulated breast tumor shown on cell phone screen below). More from UC Berkeleley on this project.
Harvard University researchers and researchers in Brazil are also joining forces to exploit cell phones for telemedicine purposes.
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