The Hemacam, a device created by two Rhode Island Hospital doctors and Brown University engineers, can detect anemia by gauging the color of tissue under the eye.
It’s a basic technique in diagnostic medicine: To check for signs of anemia, pull down a patient’s eyelid and look at the color of the conjunctival tissue. In a healthy person, it will be pink. If it’s white or very pale, the patient has a shortage of red blood cells.
But how pink is a healthy pink? A doctor can’t really tell just by looking; to confirm anemia, you need a blood test. What would it take to tell definitively from the eye tissue?
In an unusual twist on biomedical research, a pair of doctors at Rhode Island Hospital and Brown University engineering students have teamed up to solve the problem. Their answer is a hand-held device they call the “HemaCam.” And that’s just the beginning.
The research partners are using liquid crystal and polymer fibers to make simulation skin for medical training mannequins that can change color and texture to mimic jaundice, bruises, rashes and goose bumps.
They are devising nano-lasers that could be used to treat cancer. They are creating a spectroscope-based imaging system to determine the age of a bruise – and help detect child abuse, for example.
And, in a related project at Memorial Hospital of Rhode Island, another Brown engineering student is working with doctors to develop liquid crystal sensors to identify the presence of gram-negative bacteria, which cause meningitis and other serious infections.
“I see endless possibilities,” said Dr. Gregory D. Jay, an emergency physician at Rhode Island Hospital and a Brown medical professor who is working closely with the students. Biomedical engineering research often gets stuck on the lack of mutual understanding between doctors and engineers, he said, but with this collaboration, “we’ve bridged the bottleneck.”
It’s no accident that Jay and Dr. Selim Suner, a colleague at Rhode Island Hospital and Brown who is involved in the collaboration, ended up doing this. Both men have engineering degrees, and they share an interest in technological innovation in health care.
“I’ve been working toward this all my life,” Suner said. “I was an engineer first, and Greg Jay was as well, so we’ve always looked at engineering applications that could be used in medicine. … We have all this high-tech know-how, and medicine is always the last to benefit.”
The HemaCam evolved from a conversation years ago at the hospital about how a digital camera might help answer the “How pink is healthy pink?” question. Working with a resident, the doctors took digital pictures of patients’ eyes, analyzed the shades of pink, and compared their predictions to the results from blood tests. It worked.
Around that time, in 2002, Jay met Gregory Crawford, an engineering professor at Brown. Crawford invited him to speak to his students about potential research projects they could undertake. Jay mentioned the anemia test, and John McMurdy, a doctoral candidate in biomedical engineering, came up with a way to improve on the doctors’ invention.
A digital camera could just gauge the levels of red, green and blue light. But by using a spectrometer – a device that measures light across the electromagnetic spectrum – McMurdy made the test far more precise. Working together, he, Crawford and the doctors perfected a small, hand-held device they believe could make anemia blood tests obsolete.
They already have one patent on the HemaCam, plus two pending, and the doctors and McMurdy are seeking investors to support further tests and then full-blown commercialization. Brown has provided an $82,638 seed grant to support this and the other projects.
Jay said the HemaCam could have wide appeal for hospitals because it’s such a time-saver, a key benefit given the need to treat an ever-growing number of ER patients as quickly and efficiently as possible. Suner, who heads the Rhode Island Disaster Medical Assistance Team, sees the HemaCam as a potential tool for military and humanitarian missions worldwide.
“You could use it in disaster medicine, where you don’t have a lab that travels with you,” Suner said, “and screening for anemia in Third World countries, like in Africa. Anemia is rampant. There are 2 billion people in the world with anemia.”
The doctors aren’t the only ones excited about the HemaCam and other projects in this collaboration. While many engineers work in isolation, Crawford said, his students are learning a whole other approach to bioengineering, working closely with the “end user” and getting multiple opportunities to create devices that can be patented and commercialized.
There’s also “something to be said,” Crawford added, “about how students approach problems that have a human or survival value.” It’s one thing to work on a technology for its own sake, or to create, say, a better video display, he said. But if your work can help diagnose or cure a disease, “it feels very, very different.”
Leslie Shelton, a physics doctoral candidate working on the simulation skin project, said that’s why she got involved. “I heard about the collaboration with the hospital, and the whole biomedical engineering thing sounded really incredible to me,” she said.
Shelton said there’s a special thrill in taking technologies created “for no specific purpose” and using them to meet real-life needs. And she loves going to the hospital and brainstorming with the doctors right in their environment.
“[Jay] is really amazing,” she said, “because he encourages us to be creative and use the resources we have.” He gives them a choice of tasks, “and if your goal is to make an impact, there you have your opportunity.”
McMurdy is still busy with the HemaCam, but he’s also working on the bruise imaging device – and he can envision himself developing an almost endless array of high-tech applications for doctors.
“When you’re in a hospital and see how they do things at the bedside, it really makes you kind of think, ‘There’s got to be a better way to do a lot of these things,’” he said. “It’s kind of fertile ground for new projects.”
