mikenicholls88

It was eliminated in US in the early 50s but from time to time people bring it back in and then local Mosquitos transmit it to others and they have a small outbreak, about 2000 cases a year get reported in USA, mostly from recent visitors to areas where it is common https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/about/facts.html

Im still here :)

My engineer and I were building a wearable device to measure hydration of your body and were waiting on some hardware prototypes to be built, I saw a story about a young teenager who had won a YC hackathon using a mobile phone and a ball lens that aimed to diagnose Malaria.

I thought this was a pretty interesting idea but there were a lot of problems with the approach and the images he showed were pretty low quality (the ball lens not ideal for this) and it didn't seem to me there was a way to make this to a medical standard using a smart phone and having the software on the phone, too many variables that could not be controlled for this to become a medical device that would be used in a regulated environment. We felt it could be achieved if we could control the device (hence the design of the accompanying computer vision microscope).

So in our spare time while waiting for a new prototype circuit board to come back from Shenzhen we prototyped the computer vision algo.

My personal motivation was probably pretty selfish, I was just about to hit 50 and felt I had not made the impact I wanted to make on the world yet and was motivated to work on projects that were highly impactful rather than just for personal profit, I had pretty good income for a good period of time and felt it was time to do something that might change the world. It was a problem that needed to be solved and the only work I could find on it was a few academic experiments.

Also the company I worked for had a Lab that did a lot of work for Gates foundation so it was ingrained in the company culture although this project was not officially approved in the company and was not really supported until recently when they allowed me to spin it out as part of a deal and then open source it.

It probably took the two of us about 8 weeks in the first phase, I had no background in Malaria so I basically read everything I could find on the topic and gathered about 1000 images which were designated as Malarial using Google image search and a few scraping tools.

To be frank its at the stage where it needs some medical oversight, I think we have done pretty well for a bunch of non medicos techos but it needs some help now if it going to be successful.

Not a Zika expert but I don't believe this would be a good solution for Zika.

Zika is a virus, Malaria is a pathogen they are orders of magnitude difference in size. You can see Malaria in blood cells in about 400-500x magnification which is possible on even very basic microscopes.

Zika is about 40nm and I believe it can not be seen on even the strongest light microscope. Most likely you could see the damage it causes to the cells but by the time you see this its probably way too late in the process given how fast it acts.

This prototype could however be used for just about any blood condition where microscopy is the standard method of diagnosis, we would just need to train the rules to detect the specific disease/condition.

yep, the irony isnt lost on me

So far :)