How long before we can leverage a smart phone to become the tricorder Star Trek had always promised?
Apple Watch looks to be promising, and I imagine a world where humans won’t have to visit a doctor for a diagnosis, but rather to confirm, and walk a patient through a successful treatment plan
> High-resolution images of the retina are now a routine part of eye care – in particular, a type of 3D scan known as ‘optical coherence tomography’ (OCT), which is widely used in eye clinics and high-street opticians. In less than a minute, an OCT scan produces a cross-section of the retina (the back of the eye) in incredible detail – down to a thousandth of a millimetre.
[1] https://www.cureus.com/articles/106024-effective-low-cost-op...
I think the real issue with OCT cost is machine utilization. An OCT machine is cheap as medical devices go, but, in the usual US model, it gets extremely low utilization. It takes a minute or so to get a scan, it’s completely painless and requires neither dilation or any particular expertise, but the machines only get used a couple times a day.
A venue like Costco or a comparably busy place in a different country could probably offer walk-up OCT scanning for a couple dollars or maybe even free and encourage people to do it once per year. If the FDA played along, software could likely analyze the images and detect the progression of quite a few diseases, several of which would be treatable.
(A brand new machine seems to cost something like $20k. If it gets used 60 times per day (credible for a large scale user but not for a small shop), $1 of revenue per scan gives an adequate payback.)
the star trek tricorder had attachments, for example the medical tricorder had an additional module and a detachable hand scanner.
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Medical_tricorder#24th_...
the cellphone as the basis for the processing of various sensors, delivering software and connectivity, is essentially similar to this idea. Like when you have a thermal camera that connects to your cellphone.
To be fair, with complex diseases, the experts don't even understand them fully...
Trying to explain something super complex with incomplete knowledge to most humans, who often don't have even a basic understanding of how biological systems work, seems like a bad idea...
In both cases, they're correct - since no intervention is risk free, even if you have a 0% false positive rate in the sense of "I found a mass in your arm", for example, you might still have a worse outcome rate if the rate of "mass in your arm causes harm" is lower than "complications from removing mass in your arm".
That's not to say that their suggestions are right and yours are wrong, just that they're right about the reasoning but tend to dismiss concerns that they didn't think of and justify ones they did, and we need a more complicated basis for justifying this than "I think".