Your selfies may help detect pancreatic cancer
Scientists have developed an app that allows people to easily screen for pancreatic cancer and other diseases by just clicking a selfie. One of the earliest symptoms of pancreatic cancer, as well as other diseases, is jaundice, a yellow discolouration of the skin and eyes caused by a buildup of bilirubin in the blood, researchers said.
The ability to detect signs of jaundice when bilirubin levels are minimally elevated – but before they are visible to the naked eye – could enable an entirely new screening programme for individuals at risk, they said. The BiliScreen app, developed by researchers at the University of Washington in the US, uses a smartphone camera, computer vision algorithms and machine learning tools to detect increased bilirubin levels in a person’s sclera, or the white part of the eye.
The team developed a computer vision system to automatically and effectively isolate the white parts of the eye, which is a valuable tool for medical diagnostics. The app then calculates the colour information from the sclera-based on the wavelengths of light that are being reflected and absorbed and correlates it with bilirubin levels using machine learning algorithms. To account for different lighting conditions, the team tested BiliScreen with …read more
