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A 13-year-old used my artificial nose to diagnose pneumonia

blog.benjamin-cabe.com

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Re: A 13-year-old used my artificial nose to diagnose pneumonia

#91

Post by xvector »

somebodynew wrote: post #69
ravenstine wrote: post #54

Hmmm... I'm skeptical. Not necessarily because I don't think that pneumonia could be detected by testing VOCs in breath, but because I'm currently working on a project that uses sensors to do breath analysis and my amateur research has informed me that it's fairly hard to get right (which is why my primary goal is to identify deltas rather than achieve numerical accuracy). For one, VOCs can be present in breath for o…

It looks like the principle is that a machine learning model trained on the combined output of four different kinds of gas sensors can discover correlations between unintentional characteristics of the sensors. For example, the manufacturer of an ethanol or nitrogen dioxide sensor is not going to specify anything about how it responds to vanillin, but it seems plausible to me that the relationship between their respo…

Does this mean that each sensor cluster has to be trained independently?

Re: A 13-year-old used my artificial nose to diagnose pneumonia

#92

Post by dekhn »

hwillis wrote: post #74
amelius wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason why no engineer has made this yet, is because the medical data was not available to them. The innovation is in the data, not in the ML.

You are wrong. The kid GREW FUNGUS IN ARTIFICIAL LUNGS using a sterile field made out of a plastic bin with dish gloves cut into it. He didn't need medical data. Anyone could have done this- anyone with the intelligence and creativity that this kid has.

is it possible you're overstating what the kid did a bit here? The history of sterile fields shows that even great scientists take decades to debug contamination that causes false positives and negatives. ASn experiment like this can be easily thrown off by any number of variables that weren't carefully controlled for.

Re: A 13-year-old used my artificial nose to diagnose pneumonia

#93

Post by jboy55 »

dekhn wrote: post #90

Does anybody have a link to what the kid actually did? I skimmed the video, looked at the diagram, read the original MAKE article, and it seems like the kid did a science project and it doesn't actually diagnose pneumonia. Am I missing something important? The reason I'm asking is that I see a lot of these (used to judge science fairs, worked with smart undergraduates who build their own equipment) but most of it ove…

My guess, 1 He found/was given an off the shelf fungal sensor designed to detect pneumonia 2 He hooked it up to a raspi 3 He trained a small tensorflow model to give true/false signals based on the input

All in all, not that bad of a little hack.

What I'm most disappointed by these science fare projects is that its often found that the parents of the child are top engineers in the specific field of the projects. In this case, perhaps his mom is a Sr Engineer at a company producing artificial noses aimed at detecting pneumonia where she is in charge of developing dev-kits and SDKs that happen to include sample tensor flow models.

What annoys me is that the story is often one of a kid, against all odds, learning all of this tech out of their own gumption. Where in the same science fare, there probably was a kid who had no help from their parents, who hacked together a 'are the lights on' circuit, using hand-me-down tech components, who's getting no notice.

Re: A 13-year-old used my artificial nose to diagnose pneumonia

#95

Post by chokma »

ravenstine wrote: post #54

Hmmm... I'm skeptical. Not necessarily because I don't think that pneumonia could be detected by testing VOCs in breath, but because I'm currently working on a project that uses sensors to do breath analysis and my amateur research has informed me that it's fairly hard to get right (which is why my primary goal is to identify deltas rather than achieve numerical accuracy). For one, VOCs can be present in breath for o…

I have a mid-price gadget for measuring inside air quality - it detects VOC and formaldehyde, along with PM2.5 / PM 10.

It also detects alcohol from drinking a couple of beers as a dangerous increase in formaldehyde...

Re: A 13-year-old used my artificial nose to diagnose pneumonia

#96

Post by Herodotus38 »

kartben_ wrote: post #30
Herodotus38 wrote: post #22

I wish I could read the paper. I’m interested in what kind of fungal pneumonia they were looking at. My googling got me to find the title on the Middle School Facebook page but not sure if it’s available ti read.

I'll check with Caleb but I am guessing/hoping he will be willing to make the paper more broadly accessible soon.

Thanks, for reference I am a hospital physician (internal medicine) so I do occasionally deal with fungal pneumonia.

Re: A 13-year-old used my artificial nose to diagnose pneumonia

#97

Post by Herodotus38 »

thatcat wrote: post #26
Herodotus38 wrote: post #22

I wish I could read the paper. I’m interested in what kind of fungal pneumonia they were looking at. My googling got me to find the title on the Middle School Facebook page but not sure if it’s available ti read.

I doubt that it is possible to differentiate between fungal types using gas sensors trained on spores being released.

I would be interested in what they are testing, it probably wouldn’t be spores but likely something along the lines of biochemical compounds specific to certain species. For example we use blood tests for the presence of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galactomannan to help diagnose invasive aspergillosis.

Re: A 13-year-old used my artificial nose to diagnose pneumonia

#98

Post by danachow »

jboy55 wrote: post #93
dekhn wrote: post #90

Does anybody have a link to what the kid actually did? I skimmed the video, looked at the diagram, read the original MAKE article, and it seems like the kid did a science project and it doesn't actually diagnose pneumonia. Am I missing something important? The reason I'm asking is that I see a lot of these (used to judge science fairs, worked with smart undergraduates who build their own equipment) but most of it ove…

My guess, 1 He found/was given an off the shelf fungal sensor designed to detect pneumonia 2 He hooked it up to a raspi 3 He trained a small tensorflow model to give true/false signals based on the input All in all, not that bad of a little hack. What I'm most disappointed by these science fare projects is that its often found that the parents of the child are top engineers in the specific field of the projects. In t…

No that’s the point - there wasn’t evidence that any of 1, 2, or 3 was ever done. Some mime guy puts together a gas sensor and tinyml setup - the kid makes some report on the hypothetical ability to use to diagnose fungal pneumonia in reference to some papers in the literature, but I don’t see actual evidence of an actual experiment.

Re: A 13-year-old used my artificial nose to diagnose pneumonia

#100

Post by honkycat »

Brajeshwar wrote: post #23

Cool. And, I have a 13-year and she is still, literally, crying over spilt milk, hacked Roblox merchandize, how done the steak is, why her monitor is tilted wrong, and why I din't warned her before rebooting the primary router.

She's a child. I'm sure this kid has his moments as well.

Harboring resentment for your teenager for being moody is like the frog and the scorpion. it is in their nature!

Not to say isn't maddening, mind you.

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