While it's thrilling to discuss technological advancements like quantum computing and AI, early disease diagnosis is one that is most likely to help humanity.
This is because a patient's chance of survival increases with the early detection of an illness.
For instance, the five-year survival rate for ovarian cancer is 93% if it is discovered while it is still localized.
Patients with melanoma experience a comparable rise in life expectancy. A confined cancer has a 99% five-year survival rate, but once the cancer has spread, the survival rate drops to 32%.
Unfortunately, certain types of cancer, like those that affect the pancreas, lungs, and ovaries, are notoriously difficult to catch early.
In an effort to increase survival rates, researchers and tech industry startups are dedicating an increasing amount of resources to cutting-edge technologies designed to detect cancer cells earlier in development.
Take pancreatic cancer, for example.
A company called Biological Dynamics has developed a lab-on-a-chip test that looks for bio-markers specific to pancreatic cancer. The test is entering human trials now.
So far, the company has raised $125 million in funding and hopes to build on the success of the pancreatic cancer test in order to launch tests for lung cancer and ovarian cancer.
Using AI for early diagnosis is another trend in the health tech space.
Researchers at MIT are using AI models to assess lung cancer risk in patients.
The tool was trained on six years worth of lung scans from patients in the United States and Taiwan. From these scans, the tool learned to identify and categorize patterns.
It’s best at predicting lung cancer that will occur within one year, but is also capable of predicting the disease up to six years in advance.
And it’s not just cancer that tech tools can detect early.
Scientists are leveraging nanotechnology that fits inside a smartphone camera in order to diagnose a wide variety of diseases.
The idea is that this nanotechnology makes phase imaging, an advanced way of viewing cells, available to patients at home.
If this technology makes it through trials, patients will be able to take an image of their saliva or a pinprick of blood at home using phase imaging on their camera and send it directly to their medical provider for analysis.
One at-home medical test that uses smartphone technology that’s already cleared for use is the Minuteful Kidney test from Healthy.io.
The test is able to measure a patient’s albumin-to-creatinine ratio (ACR) in order to diagnose chronic kidney disease.
Patients first receive a test kit in the mail and the Minuteful Kidney app provides instructions for collecting a urine sample and dipping a test strip in the urine. After that, the patient takes a photo of the test strip with their smartphone and the app analyzes it.
The app utilizes AI technology and computer vision in order to assess albumin levels. The results are available almost immediately.
The technology has been available in Europe for more than 18 months and more than 540,000 people have already enrolled.
