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'BiliScreen' App Could Help Diagnose Pancreatic Cancer with a Selfie

Pancreatic cancer has one of the worst survival rates amongst all forms of cancer because its symptoms only manifest later. One symptom is jaundice, the yellow discoloration of the skin and sclera due to the buildup of bilirubin in the blood, which is only recognizable to the naked eye in severe stages. University of Washington researchers have developed a smartphone app called 'BiliScreen' that accurately measures jaundice in adults using a selfie and an accessory. It's a non-invasive alternative to drawing blood for measuring bilirubin levels. The app captures pictures of the eye and produces an estimate of a person's bilirubin level, even at levels undetectable by the human eye. The researchers tested two low-cost accessories that reduce the effects of external lighting - a 3D-printed box that controls the eyes' exposure to light, and paper glasses with colored squares for calibration. As a screening tool, they found that BiliScreen identifies cases of concern with a sensitivity of 89.7% and a specificity of 96.8% with the box accessory.

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    Transcript

    00:00:02 Billee screen is a smartphone app developed at the University of Washington that accurately measures jaundice in adults using just a selfie and an accessory jaundice is the yellowing of the skin and eyes due to the build-up of a compound called bilirubin in the blood stream that can be a symptom of a variety of medical conditions when people hear the term

    00:00:24 jaundice they often think about babies however adults can get jaundice as well usually from conditions like hepatitis and alcoholism jaundice is also one of the earliest indicators of pancreatic cancer a disease often goes undetected until it reaches an advanced stage when jaundice is visible to the naked eye a person's bilirubin level is normally measured through a blood draw however a

    00:00:49 doctor usually would not order a blood draw until a patient's jaundice is severe enough to be visible or the person shows other symptoms blood draws are also invasive costly and required traveling to a clinic Billee screen is a non-invasive alternative that can be use anytime anywhere it can be used for initial screening and for ongoing disease

    00:01:10 management enabling patients and health care providers to track how well a treatment is working Billee screen analyzes pictures of a person's face using computer vision to isolate the sclera the sclera is the part of a person's eye that is normally white but turns yellow from jaundice Billee screen combines the color of every pixel in the sclera into a color

    00:01:33 descriptor disregarding any blood vessels or eyelashes a machine learning algorithm translates that color descriptor into an estimate of the person's bilirubin level billi screen currently works with a choice of two accessories designed to ensure consistent results regardless of lighting conditions and the goal is to remove the need for any accessories in

    00:01:53 the future the belly screen box blocks out the ambient lighting while relying on the smartphone to supply a consistent light source from the camera flash this ensures pictures from different sources are comparable to one another for billy screens machine learning analysis an alternative is to wear the Billy screen glasses which are made out of paper and have specially colored squares around

    00:02:16 the rims the system knows what colors to expect in those squares and calibrates the images to remove the impact of ambient lighting in a clinical study involving 70 people we found that Billie screen is correct over 90% of the time in determining whether or not a person has an abnormal bilirubin level although there is more research to be done Billie screen has the potential to be an

    00:02:40 important tool in the early detection and management of diseases related to jaundice