Abstract
Cellular phone technology is emerging as an important tool in the effort to provide advanced medical care to the majority of the world population currently without access to such care. In this study, we show that non-invasive electrical measurements and the use of classifier software can be combined with cellular phone technology to produce inexpensive tissue characterization. This concept was demonstrated by the use of a Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier to distinguish through the cellular phone between heart and kidney tissue via the non-invasive multi-frequency electrical measurements acquired around the tissues. After the measurements were performed at a remote site, the raw data were transmitted through the cellular phone to a central computational site and the classifier was applied to the raw data. The results of the tissue analysis were returned to the remote data measurement site. The classifiers correctly determined the tissue type with a specificity of over 90%. When used for the detection of malignant tumors, classifiers can be designed to produce false positives in order to ensure that no tumors will be missed. This mode of operation has applications in remote non-invasive tissue diagnostics in situ in the body, in combination with medical imaging, as well as in remote diagnostics of biopsy samples in vitro.
Highlights
Telemedicine, the use of telecommunication in medicine, is becoming an increasingly important branch of medicine
One possible application of this technology is for the majority of the world population currently without access to medical imaging [7]. In another recent paper [8], we introduced the use of classifier technology for tissue characterization in X-ray mammography
We introduce the experimental procedure, the data acquisition device (DAD)
Summary
Telemedicine, the use of telecommunication in medicine, is becoming an increasingly important branch of medicine. A recent review of different wireless and networking technologies and their use to promote the ultimate goal of global health by means of deployment of a telemedicine paradigm is found in [1]. Sampling signals from sensors on patients and transmits digital data over a Bluetooth link to a mobile telephone was discussed in [2]. The use of wireless technologies, such as wireless LAN and sensor networks, for remote cardiac patient monitoring (telecardiology) was discussed in [3]. A comprehensive 3G universal mobile telecommunications system (UMTS) solution for the delivery of voice, real-time video, ECG signals, and medical scans information from an ambulance to a hospital was presented in [4].The use of medical imaging through a telecommunication network for minimally invasive surgery was introduced in 2004 [5,6]
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