Engineers at UC Berkeley yesterday announced a new solution that uses cell phones to make medical imaging available to underdeveloped parts of the world.

"Diagnosis and treatment of an estimated 20 percent of diseases would benefit from medical imaging, yet this advancement has been out of reach for millions of people in the world because the equipment is too costly to maintain," says Boris Rubinsky, UC Berkeley professor of bioengineering and mechanical engineering. "Our system would make imaging technology inexpensive and accessible for these underserved populations."

"There are three main components in medical imaging devices: data acquisition hardware (connected to the patient), image processing software, and a display device," explains Medical News Today's Peter Crosta. "If these three component pieces have to be combined into a solitary unit, the cost of the machine is substantially increased. This led Rubinsky and his team to physically separate these components, keeping the processing software required to convert the raw data into an image at an off-site and central location that has the resources to operate and maintain it."

"The cellular phone technology transmits unprocessed, raw data from the patient site DAD (data acquisition device) to the cutting-edge central facility that has the sophisticated software and hardware required for image reconstruction," writes The Jerusalem Post's Judy Siegel-Itzkovich. "This data is then returned from the central facility to the cellular phone at the DAD site in the form of an image and displayed on its screen."

More here from BusinessWeek ... more here from VNUnet ... more here from eNews 2.0 ... more here from ZDNet ... more here from Pravda ... more here from UPI ... and the press release is here.