Portable NMR With Smartphone To Detect Carcinogenic Cells
What to say about this hilarious technology? If you are under the impression that the cancer diagnostic tests are too expensive and cumbersome, then you need to go through this article. Only thing you need is a smart phone and a portable NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance) machine. This is a bed side cancer cell analyzer which is very user friendly.
![[IMG]](proxy.php?image=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.crazyengineers.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2011%2F03%2F1801403-nmr.jpg&hash=45cc3bd6dd41831b45b5d5aff81590a6)
Image credit: IEEE
A normal cancer or tumor detecting process requires a pea size tissue to be analyzed in the laboratory for days together. But this fabulous device needs no big piece of tissue. It just requires a small speck of tissue and takes less than an hour to analyze that sample. It can be used in the doctor’s office instead of the lab or the hospital. The researchers from the Harvard Medical school designed this device which could be connected to a Smartphone. This provides user friendly interface to view the test results. They tested the sample of a diseased patient and the device detected cancer 96 percent times. Now is this not fantastic! This result was published in the journal “Science Translational Medicine” a fortnight before. Usually the tumor marker testing and the biopsy is used by the doctors for the diagnosis of cancer.
A 2 mm hollow core needle is used to take a sample of tissue but it is not that safe as it has a risk of bleeding and infection. After this, the sample is examined under the microscope. The new device uses a 0.5 mm needle to collect the sample and detect the marker level. The reports are in front of us within half an hour. Hakho Lee a biomedical engineering professor at Harvard who developed the technology says “We think the device could support big medical decisions like whether to do surgery on a patient to look at the malignancy or refer them to more intensive CT or MRI scans.“ [Quoted: IEEE spectrum )
Basically, NMR is miniature nuclear magnetic resonance machine that determines the chemical structure of the organic molecules. The atoms are aligned in the strong magnetic field and vibrate under the strong radio frequency signal. The magnet in the new system can be made smaller in size. This is because it only measures the rate of decay of the oscillations rather than measuring the frequency. One more important point to mention is that the efficiency of this device is 96 percent while that of the conventional biopsy done in the lab is only 84 percent. Shan Wang an electrical engineering professor at Stanford University is working on a nano-particle based sensor which helps in detecting the defective cells by a small electrical resistance change.
This indeed is a promising technology and will help to reduce some burden and lab work for the doctors.
Image credit: IEEE
A normal cancer or tumor detecting process requires a pea size tissue to be analyzed in the laboratory for days together. But this fabulous device needs no big piece of tissue. It just requires a small speck of tissue and takes less than an hour to analyze that sample. It can be used in the doctor’s office instead of the lab or the hospital. The researchers from the Harvard Medical school designed this device which could be connected to a Smartphone. This provides user friendly interface to view the test results. They tested the sample of a diseased patient and the device detected cancer 96 percent times. Now is this not fantastic! This result was published in the journal “Science Translational Medicine” a fortnight before. Usually the tumor marker testing and the biopsy is used by the doctors for the diagnosis of cancer.
A 2 mm hollow core needle is used to take a sample of tissue but it is not that safe as it has a risk of bleeding and infection. After this, the sample is examined under the microscope. The new device uses a 0.5 mm needle to collect the sample and detect the marker level. The reports are in front of us within half an hour. Hakho Lee a biomedical engineering professor at Harvard who developed the technology says “We think the device could support big medical decisions like whether to do surgery on a patient to look at the malignancy or refer them to more intensive CT or MRI scans.“ [Quoted: IEEE spectrum )
Basically, NMR is miniature nuclear magnetic resonance machine that determines the chemical structure of the organic molecules. The atoms are aligned in the strong magnetic field and vibrate under the strong radio frequency signal. The magnet in the new system can be made smaller in size. This is because it only measures the rate of decay of the oscillations rather than measuring the frequency. One more important point to mention is that the efficiency of this device is 96 percent while that of the conventional biopsy done in the lab is only 84 percent. Shan Wang an electrical engineering professor at Stanford University is working on a nano-particle based sensor which helps in detecting the defective cells by a small electrical resistance change.
This indeed is a promising technology and will help to reduce some burden and lab work for the doctors.
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