A Breath of Medical Fresh Air

Starting in a couple of years you may be able to let out a big sigh of relief that medical diagnostics are moving away from needles and other invasive ways of figuring out what’s going on in the human body.

New technology that takes detailed readings from our breath are already being tested to determine whether an infection is viral, fungal or bacterial. Heart and cancer patients are also benefiting from such advances.

Even with the proliferation of medical technology in the last decade most patients still have to go to unwieldy machines or send tissue samples collected to labs with similar unwieldy machines. But lab-on-a-chip novel technologies are reducing the size of medical equipment while improving the ability to diagnose with greater accuracy.

In just a few years the advances will make most of the diagnostic equipment handheld. A doctor may have you blow into what looks like a large remote control and then all sorts of information can be gathered by the breath you exhale.

A new non-invasive disease detection facility, developed by the University of Leicester, has just been unveiled.

Students at Leicester University teamed up with researchers from emergency medicine, physics and astronomy, engineering, IT services – among others – to pool their knowledge and resources and create the Star Trek inspired unit.

The new facility is designed to detect the “sight, smell and feel” of disease without the use of invasive probes, blood tests, or other time-consuming and uncomfortable procedures.

Scientists from different disciplines worked closely with new technologies and figured out how to use them to examine patients. Their goal was to combine existing diagnostic tools to create a futuristic hospital bed where everything comes to the patient.

Leicester Royal Infirmary's Star Trek Inspired Sick Bay, courtesy of UKPA

The team from the Chemistry department focused on analyzing a patient’s breath.

Budding astronomers used imaging technology from the Mars rover to search for signs of disease on the surface of a patient’s body.

A third group peered inside the patient to measure blood flow and oxygenation using engineers and information technology monitors.

Chemistry Professor Paul Monks says that all these different projects were working independently when he and others had a eureka moment, realizing they could combine their efforts.

Dr. Tim Coats, who is a professor of medicine at the university and the head of the accident and emergency department at Leicester’s Royal Infirmary says the sci-fi inspired sick bay will be used to to diagnose a wide range of diseases from sepsis to bacterial infections and even some cancers.

He says, “Ultimately in the longer term we would aim to work towards something like the ‘tricorder’ device seen in futuristic science series like Star Trek. What we are developing so far is more like a first attempt at the medical bed in the sci-fi series.”

Already talking to commercial partners, the tricorder team is hoping to move this type of service into hospitals as well as have it available for emergency services in ambulances.

Leicester space scientist Mark Sims co-led the project. He says that years ago doctors would walk up and down the hallways and sniff out disease. Now there are tools to do the sniffing. This project is aiming to connect those technological advances more easily. He says, “Ten years from now it could be routine for diagnostic technology to be combined in this way.”

But for now, it’s another sample of science fiction breathing life into science fact.