Selfie scanning app spots signs of pancreatic cancer in your eyes

[knocker]

Quote

A selfie-scanning app could detect one of the most deadly “silent” cancers from the whites of your eyes before the onset of obvious symptoms.

Pancreatic cancer has one of the worst prognoses, with a five-year survival rate of about 5 per cent, partly because there are no telltale symptoms or non-invasive screening tools to catch a tumour before it spreads.

The Biliscreen app, developed by researchers at the University of Washington, uses a smartphone camera and artificial intelligence to detect increased bilirubin levels in the sclera, the whites of the eyes. Elevated bilirubin levels cause jaundice, which can be one of the first symptoms of pancreatic cancer as a tumour blocks the bile duct.

The researchers believe the ability to detect higher bilirubin levels before they are visible as a yellow tinge could enable a screening programme, helping to identify the cancer before it spreads to other organs.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/selfie-scanning-biliscreen-app-spots-signs-of-pancreatic-cancer-in-your-eyes-xtz8nrmt9

[ciel]

46 minutes ago, knocker said:

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/selfie-scanning-biliscreen-app-spots-signs-of-pancreatic-cancer-in-your-eyes-xtz8nrmt9

Is the app generally available?  Not unable to read the full article.  

Pancreatic cancer is awful. I attended a nursing reunion in a September a couple of years ago.  One of my former colleagues, married to a GP, appeared fine at the time.  I then received an email from one of her children the following March advising that she had died of this disease very shortly after the diagnosis.

[knocker]

4 minutes ago, ciel said:

Is the app generally available?  Not unable to read the full article.  

Pancreatic cancer is awful. I attended a nursing reunion in a September a couple of years ago.  One of my former colleagues, married to a GP, appeared fine at the time.  I then received an email from one of her children the following March advising that she had died of this disease very shortly after the diagnosis.

The article does not make this clear but I think not

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In a clinical study of 70 people, the Biliscreen app identified elevated bilirubin levels in 90 per cent of cases picked up by blood tests. The app is described in a paper to be presented next month at Ubicomp, a computing conference in Hawaii.

Further

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Katie Edmunds, health information officer for Cancer Research UK, said: “This would need to go through much larger clinical trials before we know whether it has the potential to be a useful and reliable tool to help diagnose pancreatic cancer. Because pancreatic cancer remains challenging to detect and treat at an early stage, prevention is especially important — keeping a healthy weight and being a non-smoker are great ways to reduce the risk.”

But I agree any progress in developing early warning signals has to be welcomed