Mobile Phones allow Sending Medical Images
Health issues have always been a problem when it comes to a daily check up as the diagnosis is costly and hence is not affordable for most individuals. Mobile phones come as a ray of hope in this situation.
A technology that supports mobile phones has been developed by Professor Rubinsky, who leads the Research Center for Research in Bioengineering in the Service of Humanity and Society at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He also teaches bioengineering and mechanical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. The main purpose of the technique is that people can easily get their medical diagnosis done with the help of a handset and a compatible device.
This can be a perfect tool for people in developing nations and even in rural areas of developed countries as they are apparently far off from modern medical centers. It takes advantage of two independent components, an stand-alone data acquisition device (DAD); and an advanced image reconstruction and hardware control multiserver unit.
“The DAD can be made with off-the-shelf parts that somebody with basic technical training can operate,” explained Rubinsky.
The DAD is placed near the patient’s site and features limited controls without image display function. The other hardware control multiserver unit is placed at central sites and it boasts to be accessible anywhere in the world. The mobile phone technology connects DAD and the multiserver unit, which does the reconstruction of images.
Let’s make the understanding of the technology more simple: when a patient needs to do his/her ultrasounds, X-rays, magnetic resonance images or any other medical imaging, he/she needs to set the DAD for unprocessed, raw-data medical imaging and send it across to the main center through cellular phone technology.
A cutting-edge central facility comes with the sophisticated software and hardware that develops the image data and returns to the phone at the DAD site in the form of an image, which will be displayed on its screen.
“You go through India, anywhere, in the middle of the road, there’s someone with a cell phone. A friend calls me from the jungles of Costa Rica,” Rubinsky added. “I can see so many applications in which the cell phone becomes an integral part of a medical device. A cell phone can cut the cost of almost every [diagnostic] device.”
Thus, with the new technology, the modest mobile phone literally gets transformed into a hi-tech medical device, proving to be a blessing for medical professional, patients and the medical fraternity as a whole.
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