Code named Athelas, Tanay Tandon from Cupertino has hacked up solution over a weekend at the Y Combinator YC Hacks hackathon.
This is not Tanay’s first project, as a High School student he built a smart phone news reader called Clipped using algorithms to summarise news stories into short summaries which now has delivered 40 million summaries with 250,000 users.
So over the weekend they built a low-cost lens attachment to the smartphone camera that images blood at high magnification. The attachment magnifies/focuses on the sample by means of a 1mm ball lens.
On top of that they adapted an Open Source Computer Vision platform called OpenCV to algorithmically count and identify cells in the bloodstream to automatically diagnose disease/conditions and then store these in a new high scalability database platform called Firebase (thanks to Firebase for blogging about Athelas)
For more than 2 centuries, cell morphology – or the practice of viewing/analyzing a person’s blood in order to diagnose conditions – has been the primary way to approach medicine.
Literally every facet of the medical world relies on blood cell analysis to diagnose conditions. Malaria, Chronic Diseases, Cancers, and all sorts of Parasites are all first detected when a physician manually recognizes the given cell type in your blood sample.
Through predictive cell counting, Athelas aims to mimic the process conducted in lab-grade environments in rural areas.
Fantastic project worthy of funding.
Can someone throw $500k at this guy and help him build a product?