blood tester
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Lab-on-a-chip aims to take suspense out of blood work
If your doctor's ever uttered the words, "I'd like to run more tests," you know the wait for results can be torturous. Engineers and students at the University of Rhode Island (URI) are hoping to stop the torture with a new lab-on-a-chip technology that cuts way back on the wait for important lab results. The system provides results in 30 minutes, using a portable device and just a drop of blood. The blood is placed on a small plastic polymer cartridge, smaller than a credit card, and inserted into a shoebox-sized biosensor. It then travels across the cartridge to a detection site where reagents enable the sensor to detect biomarkers of disease. Basically, your doctor pops a bloody piece of plastic into a box, and out come your results. The first cartridges were developed to assess the risk of heart disease, but researches suggest they could be designed to detect everything from HIV to Alzheimer's. The URI team estimates costs at $3200 for the sensor and $1.50 for the test. No official word on a release date, but we hope they won't make us wait too long -- we can't stand the suspense.
Cellphone hacked to analyze blood, detect diseases on the spot
Not that the whole using-cellphones-for-disease-detection is completely fresh, but the latest handset hack for medical purposes is still mighty impressive. UCLA researcher Dr. Aydogan Ozcan has essentially converted a standard cellphone into a portable blood tester of sorts, which is capable of detecting HIV, malaria and various other illnesses. Put as simply as possible, the device works by analyzing blood cells that are placed on an integrated off-the-shelf camera sensor and lit up with a filtered light source. Said light source exposes unique qualities of the cells, and from there, the doc's homegrown software interprets the data and determines what's what. So, has anyone given this guy the main line to NTT DoCoMo, or what?[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]
