MEDICAL UPDATES

UP kids using cell phones to diagnose diseases
P. Julian

“SHOOT,” the text message command said. In the short moment it takes to read that sentence, the cell phone displays a live cell under a motorized microscope.

Welcome to the brave new world of telemicroscopy, the technology that enables scientists to participate in experiments virtually and interact on-line with a local area network or between buildings, towns, cities or even islands wherever Internet or cell phone sites are located.

“We believe it is the only one of its kind in the world,” says Christian M. Alis, the 21-year-old whiz kid who won the first Senator Ramon Magsaysay Young Engineers Award with a P50,000 prize and a research grant of half a million pesos.

“We are not the first one to add a ‘wireless’ component to a telemicroscopy system,” he explains. “However, others use it passively as in getting the status of an experiment. We are the first one to control the microscope directly.”

Alis, of Naga City , graduated this year magna cum laude in applied physics at the University of the Philippines Diliman. He is currently pursuing a Masters degree at the UP National Institute of Physics (NIP) as a scholar of the Science Education Institute of the Department of Science and Technology.

His co-researchers included Joaquin Jose D. Escay, then an applied physics undergraduate at NIP and now head of the Optics Laser Microscopy Laboratory at Integrated Microelectronics; Bernardino J. Buenaobra, a design engineer at NIP and now head of optics and optical engineering at the same company and a graduate of Feati University; Stephen Daedalus E. Separa who used to work at iAyala and is now studying for a doctorate degree in applied physics at UP; and Alis’s mentor, Carlo Mar Y. Blanca, director of the Laser Microscopy Division at the NIP.

For their work, the group received a separate DOST grant to establish a National Telehealth Center that will prototype telemicroscopy hardware for eventual mass production.

There are many systems that cater to remote instrumentation, particularly telemicroscopy. Because they are expensive and complicated to operate, they “will not work for small institutions,” Alis says. “While the initial setup and installation is easy, adding more devices implies duplicating the entire system which is inefficient and impractical.”

“A better approach would be to abandon the monolithic system and adopt modules that are developed as building blocks. These can function independently and can be seamlessly integrated.”

Alis and his team turned to Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) – a descendant of Short Message Service (SMS), or text messaging. MMS includes graphics, photos, audio and video clips. It is frequently used to send photos videos and even slideshows from camera phones to other MMS phones or email accounts.

“Our system is cheaper,” says Alis, adding that an Intel QX3 motorized microscope with a webcam, for instance, costs about P6,000 and can be used for the diagnosis of malaria and dengue. “An equivalent microscope using telemicroscopy and peripheral tools costs about P1 million each,” he adds.

“The future points to wireless ECG readings and monitorings…smart homes with motion-trigger, user-prompted cameras and the like,” he says. “Already, we can use even the Yahoo messenger for the diagnosis of malaria and dengue.”

Both diseases – common in the Philippines – are difficult to differentiate because of the apparent similarity of their symptoms. Optical and motorized microscopes thus remain the diagnostic tools of choice.

With telemicroscopy, scientists can now access scarce, specialized instruments and conduct research without the lost time, disruption and expense of traveling to distant locations far from their laboratories.

A remote user, for example, can access the BX61 Olympus microscope through the Internet via its website. Access is regulated by passwords and security controls. The specimen under observation can be viewed by streaming video or snapshots which are sent through email or by text to a cellphone.

The user can remotely control all optical components including autofocus and automatic sample loaders. Acquired images can be saved and retrieved through laptops and mobile phones (such as the Nokia 9500, 6610 and 6680 cellphones that Alis used in research).

“The system was designed for scalability, extensibility and simplicity,” Alis points out. “It can increase the number of similar devices or users in a simple way. And it can be easily used without complicated high-tech tools or highly skilled programmers and users.”

The simple command SHOOT, for example, enables the microscope to take a single image and send an MMS message containing the image as a reply to the command. The command STREAM starts real-time video streaming of images.

“Simple wireless technology allows us to extend telemicroscopy to a much wider user base wherever wireless technology is available. They can be used in remote and secluded areas reached only by cellphone sites,” Alis says. “With the popularity of cellphones, this is a powerful technology for reaching remote communities.”