The Swift Ray 1 Turns Your Smartphone Into an Infection-Spotting Hyperspectral Imaging Tool
Designed to capture visible light, thermal, and ultraviolet fluorescence imagery, this compact gadget could help catch infection earlier.
Researchers from the McGill University Health Center, the Hospital Central Dr. Ignacio Morones Prieto, Northwestern University, Toronto Metropolitan University, and Vope Medical have worked together to build a pocket-sized device for turning a smartphone into a hyperspectral imager capable of spotting infected wounds.
"Wound care is one of today’s most expensive and overlooked threats to patients and our overall healthcare system," claims corresponding author Robert Fraser of the issue the team set out to solve. "Clinicians need better tools and data to best serve their patients who are unnecessarily suffering."
"Research has demonstrated bacterial imaging helps guide clinicians' work to remove non-viable tissue, yet it cannot identify infection by itself," adds first author Jose Ramirez-GarciaLuna. "Thermography provides insight into the inflammatory and circulatory changes happening under the skin."
The idea, then: combining multiple imaging types into a single tool: Swift Ray 1. Designed for use with a smartphone, the Swift Ray 1 replaces multiple expensive imaging tools with a single pocket-sized device capable of capturing medical-grade visible light photographs, infrared thermal imagery, and ultraviolet bacterial fluorescence imaging.
Software running on the smartphone takes data from these separate imaging approaches and combines them, each serving to overcome weaknesses in the others — and allowing the system to detect signs of infection which would otherwise be missed, with 100 percent success in identifying infected wounds, 91 percent in identifying non-infected wounds, and a 74 percent accuracy overall when given the job of sorting wounds into "non-inflamed," "inflamed," and "infected" categories.
"This was a pilot study and follow up studies are planned," Fraser admits, with the tests carried out on a cohort of just 66 patients with suitable wounds which had been cleaned and dried prior to the images being captured. "In the future, patient populations with more wound types are required to validate across populations."
The team's work has been published in the journal Frontiers in Medicine under open-access terms; those clicking through should be warned that numerous close-up images of wounds, infected and otherwise, are included in the paper.