Small medical scanners have become pretty popular lately. (We’ve recently covered a lunch-boxed sized breast cancer scanner and one that kinda sorta tells you if you might be a little sick based on your antioxidant levels.) But if you’re looking for something really handy, how about a scanner that tells you if your tumor is malignant and then sends the info to an app on your iPhone?
Dr. Ralph Weissleder of Boston’s Massachusetts General Hospital has developed a miniaturized Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) imager that can detect cancer cells by bonding magnetic nanoparticles to proteins and detecting their magnetic fields. Cells are removed from a suspicious tumors and fed into the NMR. Now, it would normally take days to get pathology results about whether a tumor is benign or malignant, but the new system uses a smartphone app to return results in under an hour.
So, not only can you find out if you might have terminal cancer in a matter of minutes, you can also do it in the comfort of your local coffee shop. We’re betting this is one app you’d be constantly refreshing over and over again.