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The healthcare industry stands to gain a lot from efforts in the technology industry. AĀ lot of companies are building smarter applications which can make a big impactĀ inĀ the healthcare industry. One of those apps is currently able to detect whether or not oneĀ has pancreatic cancer by analyzing the whites of oneāsĀ eyes. This is a major breakthrough, assuming it is accurate enough to do the job correctly.
An App is not a Doctor or a Specialist
Although the concept ofĀ smart apps makes a lot of sense to most consumers, they will not be replacing your doctors or specialists anytime soon. In fact, it is believed most currentĀ medical apps are virtually useless as they result in false positives more often than not. Every now and then, however, an app comes along which can genuinely improve oneās health in one way or another. One app in particular focuses on analyzing the whites of oneās eyes to determine whether or not the person has pancreatic cancer.
Such an analysis is often made by doctors who examineĀ a personās eyes in person. This technique is nothing new by any means. However, relying on human analysis can certainly be a problem, as it takes the human eye far more time to do this than thisĀ app can. That is quite interesting to note, as most people would not give this part of the analysis a second thought.
Pancreatic cancer has one of the lowest survival rates of all cancers, thus addressing this problem is of the utmost importance. An early diagnosisĀ of the disease can often help extend a personās life, although being fullyĀ cured will always remain difficult. This new app developed by researchers at the University of Washington will help in identifying this threat a lot quicker than any human healthcare specialist would be capable of. It is something one can easily administer themselves.
This application is calledĀ BiliScreen and uses a smartphoneās built-in camera to detect levels of bilirubin in the whites of oneās eyes. The information is combined with computer vision algorithms to yield a reliable result. Considering how pancreatic cancer causes bilirubin levels to increase ā and yellow oneās eyes ā the application should be more than capable of making a correct assessment. By the time a human specialist notices oneāsĀ eyes haveĀ gotten more yellow, it is often already too late for the patient.
Using this app is both cheaper and easier compared to taking a blood test. A blood test takes days, if not weeks, to yield a result, whereas this app will give an outcome in mere seconds. It is due time we find an effective screening method for pancreatic cancer and this application may be the solution. So far, the app has beenĀ found to be around 90% accurate, although the study was limited to just 70 patients. The goal is to make the app slightly more accurate byĀ blocking out light sources, and an update is expected to be releasedĀ next month.
Although this app has a lot of potential, scientists continue to warn againstĀ using appsĀ to gauge oneās health. This particular application is one of the few exceptions about which people should get excited. However, for every proper application with potential, there are at least 99 otherĀ applications which serve no real purpose whatsoever. It will be interesting to see if BilIScreen provesĀ useful in this regard, as the preliminary results are pretty solid. However, there is always more work to do.
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