Europa Press – 9:33 – 22/07/2015
Mozambique Physicians have used the mobile application ‘MalariaSpot’, developed by researchers at the Polytechnic University of Madrid (UPM), for the first collaborative remote diagnosis of malaria in a few minutes to analyze samples from several patients while playing with it.
The application can be downloaded from the mobile and is a simple game in that instead of killing Martians, the aim is to find the images to the parasites that cause malaria . The key is collective intelligence because, as a person can go wrong, the application combines the views of several players to get as reliable as the result of a specialist.
The test was performed from the Health Research Centre in Manhiça (Mozambique) , an institution that works closely with the Institute for Global Health of Barcelona.
From there, using a mobile phone attached to a microscope , researchers have photographed specimens from patients with symptoms of malaria. The images are uploaded to the game on the Internet for people from anywhere in the world can play with them.
Almost immediately, dozens of players summoned by social networks analyze images, allowing to have the results back in Mozambique in minutes.
This pilot is the culmination of three years of work developing a worldwide pioneering idea which has mobilized more than 30,000 players in a hundred countries and has attracted recognition from entities such as MIT, the City of Ideas in Mexico, the Singularity University at NASA or the Office of Science and Technology White House .
“We have implemented a prototype of an idea and a technology with the potential to democratize access to medical imaging diagnosis. But we are at a critical moment and we need sponsors and investors for this project to go ahead in Spain , “he explained Miguel Luengo Oroz, responsible for ‘MalariaSpot’ researcher.
The project is expanding the idea to other diseases such as tuberculosis and designing low-cost microscopes from mobile phones to clinically validate this pilot.
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