Smartphones could detect skin cancer
Dermatologists at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth) think that using smartphones as microscopes could improve the detection of skin cancer in developing countries.
A smartphone microscope can be made with a 3 mm ball lens, a tiny piece of plastic to hold the ball lens over the smartphone lens and tape to grip everything in place. A ball lens costs about US$14 at an electronics store and is typically used for laser optics.
A doctor or technician holds a smartphone microscope over a skin sample that has been placed on a slide and waits for the sample to come into focus. The doctor then either reads the sample if he or she is a pathologist, or takes a photo and emails it to a pathologist for interpretation.
“Doctors in some remote areas don’t have access to the high-powered microscopes we use to evaluate skin samples,” said Richard Jahan-Tigh, M.D., assistant professor of dermatology at John P. and Kathrine G. McGovern Medical School at UTHealth. “Doctors there could conceivable use their smartphones to photograph growths and forward them for examination.”
When it comes to the diagnosis of cancer, smartphone microscopes are reasonably accurate, according to a study conducted by Jahan-Tigh and colleagues at McGovern Medical School and Harvard Medical School. Findings appear in the ARCHIVES of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine.
“We did a head-to-head comparison with a traditional light microscope and while the smartphone microscope wasn’t as accurate it resulted in the detection of about 90 percent of the non-melanoma skin cancers,” said Jahan-Tigh, the paper’s lead author. “With the smartphone microscope, the detection rate for melanomas was 60 percent.”
Researchers examined 1,021 slides of specimens, which had a total of 136 basal cell carcinomas, 94 squamous cell carcinomas and 15 melanomas. The smartphone microscope was used to pick up 95.6 percent of the basal cell carcinomas and 89 percent of squamous cell carcinomas.
In their conclusion, the authors wrote that mobile phone-based microscopy has excellent performance characteristics for the inexpensive diagnosis of non-melanoma skin cancers in a setting where a traditional microscope is not available.
Category: Features, Technology & Devices
