Smartphone device helps to diagnose cancer

Smartphone-based device D3 (digital diffraction diagnosis system) is able to perform molecular diagnosis in under an hour

The device, was created by researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital and is made up of a smartphone and an imaging module that snaps onto it.

After a sample (blood, aspirate, or other biological fluid) is collected from a patient it is mixed with microbeads that bind to molecules expressed on the surface of cancer cells.

The mixture is then placed on a microscope slide and inserted into the D3’s imaging module, which allows the researchers to take pictures of the cell-bead mixture.

The smartphone has an application that automatically uploads the images to a secure cloud, after which they are transmitted to a server at the Massachusetts General Hospital.

The server then counts the total number of cells with beads attached to them as well as the total number of beads attached to a given cell.

Based on these numbers, the sample is classified as high-risk, low-risk, or benign.

The D3 was recently tested using cervical specimens from twenty-five patients with previously abnormal Pap smear results and the researchers reported that there was a positive correlation between the number of beads per cell and the risk of cancer, as confirmed by conventional analysis by a pathologist, and they were able to successfully classify the patients as high-risk or low-risk/benign with 100% sensitivity and 92% specificity.

Richard Conroy, program director for molecular imaging at NIBIB, the company funding the D3, said: "The speed at which this technology can diagnose disease is extremely impressive.

"The researchers have taken a process that sometimes takes several days using conventional pathology methods and have condensed it to under an hour. In addition, by taking advantage of cloud-computing and smartphone technology, they're making the technology available to those who need it the most and for a very low cost."