NIFarious Ideas: Mobile Cancer Diagnostics Platform

There is virtually an app for everything these days. Yes, that statement hold true for cancer diagnosis. Using a cell phone and a lunch box- sized machine, a team from Harvard Medical School was able to diagnose cancer outside of a clinic. The technology uses magnetic resonance to measure certain antibody activity within the sample. The result is transmitted to the cell phone and the result is displayed through an app. This will allow many forms of diagnostics to move away from the lab and bring it to the outside world where real time diagnosis is possible.


 

This technology goes beyond just cancer diagnosis. Using different diagnosis platforms, it is possible to diagnose almost any diseases. In addition, the improvement is quality of camera within the cell phone allows researcher to take a picture of sample and analyze it without the use of microscopes. With further advancement in technology, it might not be impossible to carry out many researches, diagnosis and analysis with just your phone.

The current technology of mobile phone as a research tool certainly has its limits. It is not yet practical nor efficient enough to be widely used among scientists. However, its possibility is without a bound, and has the potential to bring major impact to the world of science. We do not know how this will turn out in the end but its IDEA is definitely NIFARIOUS!

 

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NIFarious Ideas is a regular weekly column on the NIF Blog that appears every Friday. We seek to highlight the avant-garde, the dangerous, the progressive, the cutting edge in software tools, databasing, ontologies, searching, data collecting and distributing, and of course, neuroscience trends. Join us each Friday —