Cellphones used for medical imaging?

A team of engineers at the University of California at Berkeley has developed a technique for transmitting medical images via cellphones.
This potentially could bring medical imaging to the ‘three-quarters of
the world’s population which has no access to ultrasounds, X-rays,
magnetic resonance images, and other medical imaging technology.’ The
lead researcher said that this new system would make imaging technology
inexpensive and accessible in non-industrialized countries. As medical
images are usually pretty large, I was a little bit skeptical when I
first read the UC Berkeley news release. But as the researchers have
found a way to reduce these images to a mere kilobytes, it can actually
be feasible. But read more about this brilliant idea…

You can see above the system configuration used for “the breast
cancer tumors patient self-test screening. Outlined arrows indicate
optional reporting of results to the patient.” (Credit: UC Berkeley, link to a larger version)

And you can see above how this technique could be used for breast
cancer detection. On the left, you can see “the DAD [data acquisition
device] of the system with two types of gel representing a breast
cancer tumor surrounded by normal breast tissue.” The right part shows
“econstructed result as it was displayed on the screen of a commercial
cellular phone. Warm colors represent higher conductivity regions that
are typical of breast cancer lesions.” (Credit: UC Berkeley, link to a larger version)

This research has been led by Boris Rubinsky, professor of bioengineering and mechanical engineering at the University of California at Berkeley, who also works at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel. By the way, this university also has issued its own news release about this imaging technique. Rubinsky worked with PhD student Yair Granot and post-doctoral researcher Antoni Ivorra.

Before going further, let’s first look at how medical imaging is done today.
“Most medical imaging devices, said Rubinsky, consist of three
essential components: the data acquisition hardware that is connected
to the patient, the image processing software and a monitor to display
the image. When these components are combined into one unit, machine
parts often become redundant, substantially increasing the cost of the
device, he said.”

This leads him to break this model. “Rubinsky and his team came up
with the novel idea of physically separating these components so that
the most complicated element — the processing software used to
reconstruct the raw data into a meaningful image — can reside at an
offsite central location, presumably in a large center where resources
are available for its operation and maintenance. This central location
would be used to service multiple remote sites where far simpler
machines collect the raw data from the patients.”

And this where the cellphone comes in. “The phone, hooked up to the
data acquisition device, would transmit the raw data to the central
server where the information would be used to create an image. The
server would then relay the image back to the cell phone, where it can
be viewed on the cell phone’s screen. ‘This design significantly lowers
the cost of medical imaging because the apparatus at the patient site
is greatly simplified, and there is no need for personnel highly
trained in imaging processing,’ said Ivorra.”

This new medical imaging technique has been published on April 30,
2008 in the open access journal Public Library of Science ONE (PLoS ONE) under the title “A New Concept for Medical Imaging Centered on Cellular Phone Technology.” Here is a link to this article, from which the above images have been picked.

Please read it to discover the potential limitations, such as
cellphone compatibility. Here is the final summary. “This study
demonstrates the feasibility of using a cellular phone as an integrated
part of a medical imaging system in which a robust and independent DAD
is connected to the imaging processing site through the cell phone. We
believe that this concept has the potential for decreasing the
complexity of operating the imaging system at the patient site and make
state of the art diagnostic imaging as well as interventional imaging
available to people and places that do not have adequate medical
imaging now.”

Finally, here is a link to a short video
(2 minutes and 30 seconds), in which Rubinsky tells how his team
conceived and developed “a new device that uses cellphones to make
medical imaging much cheaper and more accessible to the poor.” (Video
produced by Roxanne Makasdjian, UC Berkeley Media Relations).

Sources: University of California at Berkeley news release, April 29, 2008; and various websites

You’ll find related stories by following the links below.

• Innovation
• Medicine
• Networking
• Technology
• Vision and Visualization
• Wireless

[via]http://blogs.zdnet.com/

Great i, Lousy Phone

The iPhone's call quality is
a perfect example of "version 1.0 syndrome." Apple's been making iPods
and Unix-based PCs for years. The iPhone is both, and it functions very
well as both. But Apple has never made a voice phone before, so of
course there's a learning curve. Other smartphone makers have been
through this. BlackBerrys once sounded awful; now they're among the
best voice phones out there, since the company became obsessed with RF
and voice quality. Building a truly great cell phone for voice, it
turns out, takes a bit of alchemy, involving arcane knowledge of things
like radio-wave propagation through various materials and the
psychology of audio. After 25 years of cell-phone production, there's
still wide variation in factors such as signal strength and sound
quality.

I expect, or at least hope, that Apple paid attention and will be
improving the call quality on iPhone 2.0. Transitioning to 3G will
help—in my experience, calls generally sound better on AT&T's
3G network than on the 2G network. But I'm not encouraged by the total
lack of discussion on the matter, whether it be in meetings I've had
with Apple, in Apple's public statements, or on Apple-centric blogs.
When the topic is brought up, it's usually drowned out in a chorus of
defensive zealotry and demands for 3G and GPS. This speaks to the
difficult-to-measure nature of phone-call quality: It's not something
you can tick off on a feature list or a new colorful icon for the home
screen, and it's subjective enough that fanatics can easily cloud the
issue or blame AT&T.

But the fact remains: For the iPhone to realize its potential, it must strive to be more than an i. It's already a ground-breaking, world-beating, transformative i.
It must also be a phone, and not just as an afterthought. I'm hoping
that when Steve Jobs introduces the next iPhone, he spends a little
time talking about how he's improved the second part of its name.

[via]http://www.pcmag.com/

H.P. Reports Big Advance in Memory Chip Design

Hewlett-Packard
scientists reported Wednesday in the science journal Nature that they
have designed a simple circuit element that they believe will make it
possible to build tiny powerful computers that could imitate biological
functions.

The device, called a memristor, would be used to build extremely
dense computer memory chips that use far less power than today’s DRAM
memory chips. Manufacturers of today’s chips are rapidly reaching the
limit on how much smaller chips can be.

The memristor, an
electrical resistor with memory properties, may also make it possible
to fashion advanced logic circuits, a class of reprogrammable chips
known as field programmable gate arrays, that are widely used for rapid
prototyping of new circuits and for custom-made chips that need to be
manufactured quickly.

Potentially even more tantalizing is the
ability of the memristors to store and retrieve a vast array of
intermediate values, not just the binary 1s and 0s conventional chips
use. This allows them to function like biological synapses and makes
them ideal for many artificial intelligence applications ranging from
machine vision to understanding speech.

Independent researchers
said that it seemed likely that the memristor might relatively quickly
be applied in computer memories, but that other applications could be
more challenging. Typically, technology advances are not adopted unless
they offer large advantages in cost or performance over the
technologies they are replacing.

“Whether it will be useful for
other large-scale applications is unclear at this point,” said Wolfgang
Porod, director of the Center for Nano Science and Technology at the University of Notre Dame.

The
technology should be fairly quickly commercialized, said R. Stanley
Williams, director of the quantum science research group at
Hewlett-Packard. “This is on a fast track.”

The memristor was
predicted in 1971 by Leon Chua, an electrical engineer at the
University of California, Berkeley. There have been hints of an
unexplained behavior in the literature for some time, Mr. Chua said in
a phone interview on Tuesday.

He noted, however, that he had
not worked on his idea for several decades and that he was taken by
surprise when he was contacted by the Hewlett-Packard researchers
several months ago. The advance clearly points the way to a prediction
made in 1959 by the physicist Richard Feynman that “there’s plenty of
room at the bottom,” referring to the possibility of building
atomic-scale systems.

“I can see all kinds of new technologies, and I’m thrilled,” he said.

The
original theoretical work done by Mr. Chua was laid out in a paper,
“Memristor — The Missing Circuit Element.” The paper argued that basic
electronic theory required that in addition to the three basic circuit
elements — resistors, capacitors and inductors — a fourth element
should exist.

The Hewlett-Packard research team titled their paper, “The Missing Memristor Found.”

The
Hewlett-Packard researchers said that the discovery of the memory
properties in tiny, extremely thin spots of titanium dioxide came from
a frustrating decade-long hunt for a new class of organic molecules to
serve as nano-sized switches. Researchers in both industry and academia
have hoped they would be able to fashion switches as small as the size
of a single molecule to someday replace transistors once the
semiconductor industry’s shrinking of electronic circuits made with
photolithographic techniques reached a technological limit.

The
memristor is a radically different approach from another type of solid
state storage called phase-change memory that is being pursued by I.B.M., Intel
and other companies. In phase-change memory, heat is used to shift a
glassy material from an amorphous to a crystalline state and back
again. The switching speed of these systems is both slower and requires
more power, according to the Hewlett-Packard scientists.

The
Hewlett-Packard team has successfully created working circuits based on
memristors that are as small as 15 nanometers (the diameter of an atom
is roughly about a tenth of a nanometer.) Ultimately, it will be
possible to make memristors as small as about four nanometers, Mr.
Williams said. In contrast the smallest components in today’s
semiconductors are 45 nanometers, and the industry currently does not
see a way to shrink those devices below about 20 nanometers.

Because
the concept of a memristor was developed almost 40 years ago by Mr.
Chua, it is in the public domain. The Hewlett-Packard scientists,
however, have applied for patents covering their working version of the
device.

The most significant limitation that the Hewlett-Packard
researchers said the new technology faces is that the memristors
function at about one-tenth the speed of today’s DRAM memory cells.
They can be made in the same kinds of semiconductor factories that the
chip industry now uses, however.

[via]http://www.nytimes.com/