In the fight against emerging public health
threats, early diagnosis of infectious diseases is crucial. And in poor and
remote areas of the globe where conventional medical tools like microscopes and
cytometers are unavailable, rapid diagnostic tests, or RDTs, are helping to
make disease screening quicker and simpler.
RDTs
are generally small strips on which blood or fluid samples are placed. Specific
changes in the color of the strip, which usually occur within minutes, indicate
the presence of infection. Different tests can be used to detect various
diseases, including HIV, malaria, tuberculosis and syphilis.
While
the advantages of RDTs are significant -- better disease-management, more
efficient surveillance of outbreaks in high-risk areas and the ability of
minimally trained technicians to test large number of individuals -- they can
also present problems.
"Conventional
RDTs are currently read manually, by eye, which is prone to error, especially
if various different types of tests are being used by the health care
worker," said Aydogan Ozcan, a UCLA professor of electrical engineering
and bioengineering.
To
address such challenges, Ozcan and his colleagues from the UCLA Henry Samueli
School of Engineering and Applied Science and the California NanoSystems
Institute at UCLA have developed a compact and cost-effective RDT-reading device
that works in tandem with standard cell phones.
"What
we have created is a digital 'universal' reader for all RDTs, without any
manual decision-making," he said.
The
RDT-reader attachment, which clips onto a cell phone, weighs approximately 65
grams and includes an inexpensive lens, three LED arrays and two AAA batteries.
The platform has the ability to read nearly every type of RDT. An RDT strip is
inserted into the attachment, and with the help of cell phone's existing camera
unit and a special smart-phone application, the strip is converted into a
digital image.
The
platform then rapidly reads the digitized RTD image to determine, first,
whether the test is valid and, second, whether the results are positive or
negative, thus eliminating the potential errors that can occur with a human
reader, especially one administering multiple tests of various test types. And
because the color changes in RDTs don't last more than a few hours in the
field, the ability to store the digitized image indefinitely provides an added
benefit.
After
this step, the RDT-reader platform wirelessly transmits the results of the
tests to a global server, which processes them, stores them and, using Google
Maps, creates maps charting the spread of various diseases and conditions --
both geographically and over time -- throughout the world.
Together,
the universal RDT reader and the mapping feature, which have been implemented
on both iPhones and Android-based smart-phones, could significantly increase
our ability to track emerging epidemics worldwide and aid in epidemic
preparedness, the researchers say.
"This
platform would be quite useful for global health professionals, as well as for
policymakers, to understand cause-effect relationships at a much larger scale
for combating infectious diseases," Ozcan said.
The
research is published in the journal Lab on a Chip.
Additional
authors of the study include Onur Mudanyali (first author), Stoyan Dimitrov,
Uzair Sikora, Swati Padmanabhan, and Isa Navruz, all of the department of
electrical engineering at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and
Applied Science.
Ozcan
and his UCLA research team have been developing a variety of cell-phone
attachments that utilize the digital components already embedded in standard
cell phones to aid in the fight against global disease.
With
more than 5 billion cell-phone subscribers around the world today, cell phones
can play a central role in telemedicine applications, and existing wireless
telecommunications infrastructure presents new opportunities for innovative
cloud-based health-monitoring and management platforms, the researchers say.
ScienceDaily
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