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