Andrew Ng on Deep Machine Learning via Large Scale Brain Simulation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5elcmFNRCWk
The key determinants of learning accuracy are accessing as much data as possible and being able to process.
Partnered with the Google speech team.
Deep learning works well in two different settings:
1. Learning from labeled data > speech recognition, streetview images
2. Learning from unlabeled data >
Up to now, humans have been driving performance due mainly to a lack of data and processing. With both of these now becoming available in abundance, machine learning will soon overtake human learning to become the dominant driver of performance.
Whole genome sequencing holds great potential for enriching diagnoses and understanding hereditary risk factors for specific diseases. However, the sheer volume of data involved poses major technical challenges, which limits the utility of this approach. For this reason many clinical geneticists have turned to exome sequencing which looks at a small portion of the genome that codes for proteins.
A team from the University of Chicago have managed to turn the spotlight back on whole genome sequencing by analyzing 240 full genomes in two days by recruiting the computational muscle of Beagle, one of the world’s fastest supercomputers. Beagle is a Cray XE6 supercomputer at the Argonne National Laboratory outside Chicago, and is used for computation, simulation, and data analysis for the biomedical research community.
The architecture of the Beagle is such that it allows highly efficient and rapid processing of parallel data streams. To give you some idea of just how powerful the Beagle is, the researchers estimate that the equivalent task carried out by a single 2.1 GHz CPU would take approximately 47.2 years to complete.
According to one of the lead investigators, Professor Elizabeth McNally:
Improving analysis through both speed and accuracy reduces the price per genome, with this approach, the price for analyzing an entire genome is less than the cost of the looking at just a fraction of genome. New technology promises to bring the costs of sequencing down to around $1,000 per genome. Our goal is get the cost of analysis down into that range.
The team have published their results, in great technical depth, in the journalBioinformaticsand while we won’t see this kind of technology in clinics anytime soon, it should certainly enhance the pace and clinical utility of whole genome sequencing.
The point isn’t the gadget: it’s the combination of the intimacy of a device that is always with us and that only we use, with the power of cloud-based processing and storage. The wearable device itself is actually only the small, physical manifestation of a much larger service: Google Glass gives its wearers a head-up display, voice control and a forward-facing camera, but it’s only through a connection to the internet that it can live up to its potential
“He put this engine into our ears,” wrote the Lilliputians, in Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift’s 1726 classic, “which made an incessant noise, like that of a water-mill: and we conjecture it is either some unknown animal, or the god that he worships; but we are more inclined to the latter opinion, because he assured us, (if we understood him right, for he expressed himself very imperfectly) that he seldom did any thing without consulting it. He called it his oracle and said it pointed out the time for every action of his life.”
Just as Gulliver’s Travels was a satire, and its description of his watch essentially a tease on time-based affairs, so too we are starting to find that the accoutrements of our modern communications are ripe for mickey-taking. The Bluetooth headset has gone from a status symbol to the mark of a tosser. There’s a Britishness to this — a who do you think you are to need such a device? thing. There’s also a feeling of enslavement that might be hard to shake. Just as our culture turns towards reducing the digital distraction in our lives, will we really want to be cuffed to our inbox? It’s said that in a ham-and-egg sandwich, the chicken is involved but the pig is committed: just how committed to our communications do we want to — or want to appear to — actually be?
“It’s not information overload. It’s filter failure.” Clay Shirky
This article was taken from the January 2014 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired’s articles in print before they’re posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content bysubscribing online.
Wearables are truly upon us. It takes about a decade to shift: from the basements of the 70s, to the desks of the 80s, the laps of the 90s, the front rooms of the noughties and pockets of the twenty teens, the location of hot computing — the place where the most interesting developments are happening — always moves and shrinks with every generation. And although this decade is all about the smartphone, today we’re starting to see the path to the next stop in this constant progression: if not in, then definitely on the body.
As we’ll discuss, this leap, from the situated and leave-behindable to the always-on, always-present, always–connected, is not without its drawbacks. But it also promises a near-future world of self-knowledge, sensors and superpowers. Even today we can monitor our activities and compare ‘n’ share with our friends via devices such as the Nike+ FuelBand, the Fitbit or the Jawbone UP; and we can bring information, alerts and alarms to our wrist with devices like the Pebble watch. Coming devices will give you head-up displays, vibrating interfaces, speech recognition and a constant –understanding of where you and it are in time and space. By smearing the interface between –yourself and the internet across your nervous system, wearables are the first step in augmentation of the human. They give us superpowers in the same way cybernetic implants do to the heroes of science fiction.
The point isn’t the gadget: it’s the combination of the intimacy of a device that is always with us and that only we use, with the power of cloud-based processing and storage. The wearable device itself is actually only the small, physical manifestation of a much larger service: Google Glass gives its wearers a head-up display, voice control and a forward-facing camera, but it’s only through a connection to the internet that it can live up to its potential.
And what potential — never forget a name again, thanks to its camera, facial-recognition tech and a link to your social networks. Never be lost, through the map hovering in the corner of your eye. Develop an instant expertise in the art you’re looking at with a reverse image-search and a Wikipedia lookup. Have perfect memories of everything you do, say, see or hear through a constant archive of point-of-view shot from your forehead. Be a more scintillating conversationalist by recording, transcribing and automatically Googling everything you hear. Link your devices and adjust your day’s agenda to match your pulse-rate-monitored stress levels. Receive an ambient alert to your wrist whenever you’re close to something that’s on your phone-stored shopping list, and whisper to your glasses to show you where it is on the shelf. Feel a tingle in your pocket when you walk past someone whose OKCupid profile matches your own, and whose biomonitoring devices -indicate is in a receptive mood. Automatically plot a route to work that takes you past breakfast places whose menus match your immediate biochemical needs, and have this hover in front of you as you cycle, with warnings for when you’re pedalling too hard for your heart, and notifications of upcoming meetings being cancelled, as you sub-vocalise acknowledgements in English, having them translated in real-time into the Japanese of your colleague’s wrist-bound diary.
Many of these scenarios are dependent on different devices, from different manufacturers, successfully talking to each other: for wearables to sing the body electric, they must first form choirs. Rival firms will have to adopt compatible standards and allow for truly open development before the more advanced ideas are possible. But these are engineering and business decisions. More important for wearables, with their curious mix of the intimate and the public, is the social reaction to their use.
The surest sign of a technological niche about to be filled is an outbreak of Apple rumours. No other firm produces such a flurry of speculation, guesswork and extrapolation of minor signals as Apple. The iWatch (name by popular consensus) has never been mentioned by anyone from Apple, nor has anyone from its supply chain spoken of it or leaked any details, but nevertheless there are signs that such a thing might be on its way.
Apple has a handful of patents that look useful, plus there are a few details in the new iPhone and iOS that would make a lot of sense if an iWatch existed. The iPhone 5s has a chip dedicated to monitoring its owner’s movements, making it in essence a pocket-carried FuelBand, which shows that Apple is at least paying attention to the quantified-self idea. And iOS7 has a feature, iBeacon, which allows for communication with low-powered devices using the newest Bluetooth standard. That would be very useful over the range between your pocket and your wrist. Siri, the voice interface on iOS, would be splendid on a wearable, and the iOS notifications screen looks eminently transferable. But all of this is, of course, entirely conjecture. The beguiling/tiring axis of Apple product fantasies is subject to the traditional Apple announcement-and-launch schedule, and the likely slot for the Next Big Thing is the mid-January keynote, just in time to make everyone look mournfully at their month-old but now painfully past-it Christmas presents.
Like many internet technologies, wearables are very much a product of the environment in which they are funded and designed, primarily that of Silicon Valley — both the physical place and its thought-construct offshoots around the world. Invariably, the use-case scenarios for wearables both address problems that are two degrees away from behaviours not already invested in, and furthermore take a technofundamentalist position on existing social norms.
To think about this, consider that there are two classes of wearables today: the introspective, which monitors what you do and where you go, and informs you of changes to the state of your body and expanded self in cyberspace; and the extrospective, which looks outwards, to monitor and record the world around you. A Nike+ FuelBand is introspective. A Narrative Clip cam, which takes pictures constantly as you wear it, is extrospective. The introspective is of no concern to others. Who cares if you’re counting your steps? But the extrospective is a different beast. Society has yet to evolve the correct etiquette for having a meeting with someone who is constantly recording and archiving their conversations, or for going to a party with someone whose necklace is uploading pictures of you to the cloud every 30 seconds. It is as hard to imagine future generations’ views on these things as it is today to understand the Victorians’ erotic desire for table legs. But today’s society might find it challenging, if not already illegal, under different countries’ privacy laws. You may be able to remember the faces of all the people you meet, but use a device to capture them automatically and put them into a database, and a line is being crossed — even if that data is inaccessible to others. Whether that line demarcates violating others’ privacy — or breaking your own sense of non-augmented humanity — is something we will have to hash out.
Some wearable technology has already developed a level of understood etiquette. A glance at your watch in the middle of a meeting is rude. But it’s also an action that is understood by the person you are meeting: you wanted to know the time. Wearables, especially those with displays that cannot be seen by others, go much further than this. You may be aware that the other person just interacted with their device, but you have no idea what that interaction was. As interfaces become more ambient, or more fluid, the social meaning of interacting with them mid-conversation becomes more confused and potent. Today’s one-on-one conversations might be tomorrow’s one-on-one-plus-her-fact-checking-AI conversations. Just what did that mid-conversation microdistraction mean? That your lies have been found out, or that their football team just scored? It will be unnerving.
Valley-based technologists, however, may take the more fundamentalist view that it is not their technologies’ place to deal with human insecurities, but rather society’s job. The ideology of what it is possible to do with the technology is paramount, and human squeamishness has no role to play: a sort of device-led fait accompli. This is already happening, for example, in the concerns expressed around the supposed inability of the digital world to forget youthful indiscretions, prompting the then CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, to suggest that in the future, people might change their name at a certain age to reset their online identity. Wearables could accelerate this process.
The social and the technical are inevitably interlinked. Although wearables have themselves been enabled by advances in chip design and component miniaturisation, it is perhaps that relentless technological progress that precedes their downfall. There is an old joke in software design that all programs expand until they can receive email. Likewise, we might suspect that all tiny devices will upgrade until they are general–purpose computers. This has already happened with phones — the iPhone 5S is purportedly as powerful as a MacBook Pro from 2008 — but phones can be put away, or obviously turned off. A wristband that today might be expected to just count your steps could, in theory, be programmed to record all that happens around it, upload that data to the cloud and do something mysterious with it. We are never sure about how new technologies will be received, and history is full of examples of our willingness to accept new deskbound technologies. Wearables, –however, push tech into the fields of fashion, of social signifier and public display. At your laptop, in private, you’re hard to judge. Use these technologies in public, and they enter a different realm.
“He put this engine into our ears,” wrote the Lilliputians, in Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift’s 1726 classic, “which made an incessant noise, like that of a water-mill: and we conjecture it is either some unknown animal, or the god that he worships; but we are more inclined to the latter opinion, because he assured us, (if we understood him right, for he expressed himself very imperfectly) that he seldom did any thing without consulting it. He called it his oracle and said it pointed out the time for every action of his life.”
Just as Gulliver’s Travels was a satire, and its description of his watch essentially a tease on time-based affairs, so too we are starting to find that the accoutrements of our modern communications are ripe for mickey-taking. The Bluetooth headset has gone from a status symbol to the mark of a tosser. There’s a Britishness to this — a who do you think you are to need such a device? thing. There’s also a feeling of enslavement that might be hard to shake. Just as our culture turns towards reducing the digital distraction in our lives, will we really want to be cuffed to our inbox? It’s said that in a ham-and-egg sandwich, the chicken is involved but the pig is committed: just how committed to our communications do we want to — or want to appear to — actually be?
As timepieces, wristwatches have been generally replaced by the clock on your phone. But that notwithstanding, a cheap digital watch keeps the time as well as the most expensive chronometers. Spending more than £5 on a watch is not a decision of practical use: the men’s watch market, for example, is now almost entirely one of fashion, of signifiers of wealth, of male-accepted jewellery — either that, or wine bars are popular with deep-sea divers.
But that market is based entirely on notions of craftsmanship, tradition and symbols of supposed manliness that are notably absent with the sort of wearable technologies we’re talking about here. Equating rapidly innovating devices with luxury misses the point of either: you can stick jewels to something, or you can make it super rugged, but neither of those will take away from the fact that they are functional devices, soon to be declared obsolete and upgraded. They’re built to do a job; on the nature of that job will you be judged — and that job might be nerdy.
The slow roll-out of Google Glass is a case in point. It is undoubtedly amazing technology and there are plenty of use-cases for wearing it while doing something else. But even before anyone had seen it in the wild, there was a word for people wearing it casually around the place: “glassholes”. Already dubbed “a Segway for the face”, Google Glass may turn out to be the most useful thing ever, but wear it all the time and you’ll be put into the same social slot as people with shoulder-holsters for their BlackBerry.
Ultimately, though, that’s a question of marketing and the transformation of social norms. So too is our commitment to our data. The recent fashions of unplugging, digital detoxing, email fasts and screen-break sabbaths have highlighted the desire of many to be free from the constant flow of information. As an activity that happens in front of a large, special-purpose machine on our desks, this feels like work, even when it’s play.
The limitations of the devices might be their, and our, saviour in this regard. As NYU professor and writer Clay Shirky says, “It’s not information overload. It’s filter failure.” Perhaps the limited size of the display, the cruder signalling from a wearable device, will encourage developers to refine those filters. If all you can display is a few lines of text, or if it’s one vibration for left and two for right, then the filtering will need to be done by the system, and not by the user. The stupid device being the pointy end of complex software places the responsibility for technological sophistication back into the laps of the programmers and designers.
Wearable technologies promise a great deal. For the individual, their usefulness, their very intimacy, offers a levelling-up of personal ability and self–understanding. One app that already exists for the iPhone, Word Lens, offers real-time translation of printed text, such as street signs, in the video camera, laid over the original text. That or something like it will be a Google Glass app sooner or later.
The barrier between the internet and the rest of the world is weakened by wearables, and their technology is no longer a personal matter. Using them might prove to be — in circumstances of extrospection, or of massive–augmentation of personal ability — considered socially unacceptable, unfair or just uncool. How that social progress plays out will be just as interesting as the technology itself. Personal computing is no longer personal. We will wear it like we wear our heart: on our sleeve.
super-cool, almost about time really… http://www.springwise.com/edible-batteries-power-tech-bodies/
Edible batteries could power tech inside our bodies
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have created ingestible batteries, that could make internal devices a possibility.
29 Jan 2014 Spotted by Raymond Neo, written by Springwise
While wearable technology is bringing smart devices even closer to home, another emerging field is the development of electronics that actually sit inside our bodies. We recently reported on TruTag — ingestible nanoscale electronic tags that could help tackle pharma fraud — and now researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have created edible batteries, that could be used to power biodegradable devices located inside the body.Developed by professors Christopher Bettinger and Jay Whitacre, from the materials science and engineering and biomedical engineering department at the institution, the idea stems from the need for a power source for biodegradable electronic materials that could have a number of medical benefits — timed drug delivery or health tracking, for example. The result is a non-toxic sodium ion battery that uses melanin derived from an organic material — cuttlefish ink. Since the ink is fairly commonly available, the cost of the edible batteries is low. The team says that the devices could be ingested in much the same way as a pill, without the need for prior sterilization, and any casing is biodegradable and deteriorates in the body. Combined with other technology, the batteries could have wide-ranging use — both medical and otherwise. In the near future, Bettinger imagines that humans could be taking his battery pills once a day in order to keep internal devices running. What possible inventions could be brought about thanks to this development? Website: www.cmu.edu Contact: cbetting@andrew.cmu.edu
The U.S. healthcare system is sick, but increasingly early stage investors are spending money on new technology companies they believe can help provide a cure.
Earlier this week, Greylock Partners, one of the investors behind Facebook and LinkedIn, and the Russian billionaire technology investor Yuri Milner put together a $1.2 million round alongside a group of co-investors to back First Opinion – a consumer facing service selling a way to text message doctors anytime of day or night.
Greylock and Milner join a growing roster of technology investors focused on healthcare in recent years. The number of companies raising money from investors for the first or second time has skyrocketed since the passage of the Affordable Care Act, according to data from CrunchBase.
In 2010, the year in which President Obama signed the ACA into law, there were only 17 seed- and Series A-stage healthcare-focused software and application development companies which had raised money from investors. By the end of last year, that number jumped to 89 companies tackling problems specifically related to the healthcare industry, according to CrunchBase metrics.
Across all categories, investors spent over $1.9 billion in 195 deals with commitments over $2 million, according to a report from early stage investment firm Rock Health. Funding was up 39% from 2012 and 119% from 2011, the Rock Health report said.
And there’s plenty of room for the market to grow, according to Google Ventures’ general partner Dr. Krishna Yeshwant. “We’re still at the very beginning of what this is going to look like,” said Dr. Yeshwant.
Google Ventures is addressing the nation’s healthcare dilemma with investments in companies like the physicians’ office and network One Medical Group, which raised a later stage $30 million last March. At the opposite end of the spectrum in December 2013 Google invested in the $3 million seed financing of Doctor on Demand, which sells a service enabling users to video chat with doctors.
Unsurprisingly, the explosion in healthcare investments tracks directly back to the passage of the Affordable Care Act, investors said. “The incentives brought forward by the ACA shift what makes sense,” in healthcare, Dr. Yeshwant said.
“At the highest level there’s now a forcing function to take advantage of the efficiency technology provides,” said Bill Ericson, a general partner with Mohr Davidow Ventures, who led the firm’s investment in HealthTap, a service for consumers to message doctors with healthcare questions.
Overwhelmingly, Silicon Valley is leading the charge in these innovations, according to CrunchBase.
This flood of capital has pushed some investors like Founders Fund to re-think their strategy, and de-emphasize healthcare software in search of other, larger opportunities.
““The reason we have somewhat shifted focus away from healthcare IT is because there is so much investment going into that space. So we think the problems there are being sufficiently addressed by the full market.” said Brian Singerman, a partner at Founders Fund.
The firm’s most recent investment was in Oscar, a new, New York-based insurance company. Yes… an insurance company.
“In healthcare there is a tech stack around genomics, digitization, biometrics, analytics, and actual cures; one of the things that ties that all together is insurance,” said Singerman.
“Launching a new insurance company is not something that happens very often. While you could launch a new insurance company without the Affordable Care Act, the catalyst it gives you by being on the same page as the big incumbents is unprecedented.”
At Google Ventures, Dr. Yeshwant thinks there will be more opportunities for tech-enabled companies like Oscar and One Medical to compete in these broad industrial categories rather than offering point solutions. “Instead of being a piece of the system, it’s being the entire entity,” he said.
“The thing to keep in mind… with the healthcare industry is that it is far bigger than tech. As an entity it is where we’re spending 17% to 18% of GDP, so any one segment is tens of billions of dollars,” Dr. Yeshwant said. “Increasingly you’re seeing IT investors who have a fine sense of disruptive opportunities enter the market.”
Noninvasive continuous glucose monitors (CGMs) are seen as a holy grail for the management of diabetes, and Google claims its prototypes are capable of continuous readings at a rate of once per second
working with the FDA
already completed clinical trials
wonder if they’re thinking about prevention rather than management?
Were you wondering why Google sent members of its mysterious Google X research group to meet with the FDA‘s eye department a few days ago? Wait no longer: Google will be entering into the medical device foray with a stunner. It announced its plans for a new contact lens on its blog yesterday. However, this won’t be a more compact Google Glass – the advanced wearable is a medical device aimed at the management of diabetes.
Google is preparing the contact lens to measure glucose levels from the wearer’s tears and to beam the data wirelessly to a receiver (presumably a smart phone). Noninvasive continuous glucose monitors (CGMs) are seen as a holy grail for the management of diabetes, and Google claims its prototypes are capable of continuous readings at a rate of once per second, with less hassle and pain than current CGMs which are bulky and require needle sticks about once a week. Furthermore, Google plans on integrating tiny LEDs as instantaneous early warning systems for the user if the glucose level is out of range. The company is working with the FDA on this device, and has said that they will collaborate with experts that can bring the contact lens and its corresponding app to market for both patients and doctors to better manage diabetes together. They have already done multiple clinical trials.
Research into this technology has been explored for over a decade now, and Google may finally have the power to bring it to market. Diabetics – would you try these contacts? Let us know what you think in the comments!
Interesting highly-speculative piece on Google’s visit to the FDA for a meet and greet.
The eye is a great place to stick a sensor given it’s continuity with the innards. It’s also a great place to view the innards. While we’re there, why not be powered by the innards at the same time?
Google X Staff Meet With FDA Pointing Toward New Device
By Brian Womack and Anna Edney Jan 10, 2014 4:01 PM ET
Google Inc. (GOOG) sent employees with ties to its secretive X research group to meet with U.S. regulators who oversee medical devices, raising the possibility of a new product that may involve biosensors from the unit that developed computerized glasses.
The meeting included at least four Google workers, some of whom have connections with Google X — and have done research on sensors, including contact lenses that help wearers monitor their biological data. Google staff met with those at the Food and Drug Administration who regulate eye devices and diagnostics for heart conditions, according to the agency’s public calendar.
As technology and medicine merge to give consumers more control over their health, innovators from mobile-health application developers to DNA analysis companies have struggled to meet the demands of federal oversight. The FDA ordered Google-backed 23andMe Inc. in November to halt sales of its personal gene test, saying it hadn’t gained agency approval.
Google, expanding beyond its core search-engine business, is investing in long-term projects at its X lab that may lead to new market opportunities, including the Glass devices, driverless cars and high-altitude air balloons to provide wireless Internet access. While some projects may not deliver significant profits and revenue, the company is committed to making bets on research and development, according to Chief Executive Officer Larry Page.
Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg
Google has introduced Glass devices, computerized eyewear that lets users check e-mail… Read More
“Our main job is to figure out how to obviously invest more to achieve greater outcomes for the world, for the company,” Page said during a call with analysts last July. “And I think those opportunities are clearly there.”
Google Glass
Already, Google has introduced Glass devices, computerized eyewear that lets users check e-mail or access their favorite music. The devices, now being used by testers and developers, aren’t yet widely available for consumers.
FDA’s public calendar also shows the Google representatives met with the head of the agency’s office that reviews device applications for marketing approval, and the FDA adviser who wrote the agency’s guidelines for mobile medical apps. The FDA classified Google’s visit to Silver Spring, Maryland, where the agency is based, as a meet and greet. Jennifer Rodriguez, a spokeswoman for the agency, confirmed the meeting and declined to provide further information.
One of the Google participants was Andrew Conrad, who joined X last year. Conrad is a former chief scientist at Laboratory Corporation of America Holdings and co-founder of its National Genetics Institute.
Photographer: Krisztian Bocsi/Bloomberg
A Google Inc. logo sits on a wall outside the entrance to the company’s offices in Berlin.
Among other attendees was Brian Otis and Zenghe “Zach” Liu. Courtney Hohne, a spokeswoman for Mountain View, California-based Google, didn’t return messages seeking comment on the company’s meeting with the FDA.
Engineering Work
Otis is on leave to Google from the University ofWashington in Seattle, where he is an associate professor in the electrical engineering department, according to the university’s website. Otis has worked on biosensors and holds a patent that involves a wireless powered contact lens with a biosensor.
One of Otis’ colleagues is Babak Parviz, who was involved in the Google Glass project and has talked about putting displays on contact lenses, including lenses that monitor wearer’s health.
“Noninvasive monitoring of the wearer’s biomarkers and health indicators could be a huge future market,” Parviz wrote in a 2009 paper titled “Augmented Reality in a Contact Lens.”
In 2012, the two were among the co-authors in a paper titled “Glucose Sensor for Wireless Contact-Lens Tear Glucose Monitoring” for the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits.
‘Wearable’ Lenses
“Advances in technology scaling, sensor devices, and ultra low-power circuit design techniques have now made it possible to integrate complex wireless electronics onto the surface of a wearable contact lens,” according to the paper.
In a presentation, Parviz said a tear drop provides many different components to give sensors various types of information about how a body is operating.
“There is actually one interface on the surface of the body that can literally provide us with a window of what happens inside, and that’s the surface of the eye,” Parviz said in a video posted on YouTube. “It’s a very interesting chemical interface.”
Liu, formerly with the medical-device manufacturer Abbott Laboratories (ABT), also holds a patent that involves devices that use bodily fluids to read levels of human substances such as glucose or cholesterol.
A laser pulse creates a vapor nanobubble in a malaria-infected cell and is used to noninvasively diagnose malaria rapidly and with high sensitivity. Credit: E. Lukianova-Hleb/Rice University
Malaria continues to be a persistent problem in large parts of the world and a great deal of effort has been spent fighting the disease. Yet, diagnosing malaria still requires a blood draw, reagents, and a trained medical professional to perform the test. Moreover, these tests are both labor and time intensive, making them difficult to offer in resource-poor environments. Now a team from Rice University has developed a completely new test that doesn’t require a blood sample nor a reagent to test whether it’s infected by the parasite. Additionally, once developed into a product, the device shouldn’t require a medical professional to do the testing.
The system relies on a laser that creates “vapor nanobubbles” within infected cells. These bubbles eventually pop and create a signature sound that is acoustically detected by the device. In pre-clinical testing, the team showed that the device was able to spot single malaria infected cell among a million healthy ones without any false positives whatsoever.
From the study abstract in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences:
Here we show that the high optical absorbance and nanosize of endogenous heme nanoparticles called “hemozoin,” a unique component of all blood-stage malaria parasites, generates a transient vapor nanobubble around hemozoin in response to a short and safe near-infrared picosecond laser pulse. The acoustic signals of these malaria-specific nanobubbles provided transdermal noninvasive and rapid detection of a malaria infection as low as 0.00034% in animals without using any reagents or drawing blood. These on-demand transient events have no analogs among current malaria markers and probes, can detect and screen malaria in seconds, and can be realized as a compact, easy-to-use, inexpensive, and safe field technology.
The U.S. healthcare system 
