October 4, 2017.
A team of researchers from the California Institute of Technology in the United States has developed a mobile app that can tell if your heart is doing well or not within 2 minutes.
A diagnosis in 2 minutes
Do you have a heartache and want to know if these pains are worrying? Very soon you will just have to check your smartphone to see if your heart is doing well or not. In any case, this is what American researchers are saying in a study published in the journal News Medical Life Sciences. According to this work, a simple application would be useful to know if we have good heart health.
Currently, to find out if you have a heart problem, you need to do an MRI or an echocardiogram. It is expensive and time consuming (around 30 minutes). The mobile application gives its diagnosis in 2 minutes. The authors of this study tested their tool on 72 people between the ages of 20 and 92 and it showed its effectiveness. This could lead to commercialization in the coming months.
An upcoming marketing of this application
The margin of error observed during these tests was around 19%. However, when a patient has a classic echocardiogram, the margin of error is around 20%. To make this application work, just put your smartphone near your neck. By observing the activity of the carotid artery, through the phone’s camera, the app is able to know if the heart is healthy.
Concretely, the application controls the percentage of ejection of blood contained in a heart chamber during a beat, this is called the left ventricular ejection fraction (FEV). It seems incredible but it is nevertheless this simple observation that makes the diagnosis possible. One can imagine the medical progress that such an application would allow. A start up, called Avicena, has already been created to market the tool.
Marine Rondot
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