It’s a Tricorder, Jim, but not as we know it: researchers in Mexico and Canada have created what could be considered a real-life medical Tricorder, similar to what you might remember from Star Trek, called the Swift Ray 1.
In the Star Trek universe, a tricorder is an all-purpose device that can analyse and record data. Although many people liken the standard ‘Tricorder’ to the smartphone, which functionally does a lot of the same basic routines as the standard Tricorder seen in the shows and movies, the far less common Medical Tricorder was built, specifically, to assist with medical routines.
Think about if you had a hand-held device that you could hold over a wound, use it to analyse the wound, and then know what the wound really is. That’s what we’re dealing with here, with the Swift Ray 1. It’s not the first device to be likened to the Medical Tricorder, but it certainly shows promise.
The Swift Ray 1 is a pocket-sized device that has been developed by Swift Medical and Northwestern University in Canada, and according to the research, it can distinguish between non-infected and infected wounds with an accuracy of between 91 and 100 per cent.
It does this using imagery, infrared imagery, and images that make bacteria fluoresce to identify three different wound states (inflamed, infected, or neither). The Swift Ray 1 connects to a smartphone, and is then operable using software built for the tech.
“Research has demonstrated bacterial imaging helps guide clinicians’ work to remove nonviable tissue, yet it cannot identify infection by itself,” McGill University Health Centre’s Doctor Jose Ramirez-GarciaLuna of McGill University said (he’s the first author of the study).
“Thermography provides insight into the inflammatory and circulatory changes happening under the skin.”
66 patients were trialled with the device, and further studies are planned. It’s expected that the Swift Ray 1 could help doctors treat wounds faster, before becoming seriously dangerous.
Anyway, if you’d like to read about the research that went into the Swift Ray 1, it has been published in Frontiers in Medicine.