Tricorder® Watch Update

(Note ; this posting was e-mailed to Oxford Diagnostics for comment on Dec.13th for comment. To date none has been received)
The Oct.3rd posting discussed what characteristics a diagnostic piece of equipment would need to be a Tricorder ®. They were:
- To be non invasive
- Portable
- Not harm the patient
While current glucose meters are portable, they will harm the patient and are invasive, requiring a drop of blood.
A new tool for diagnosing diabetes mellitus has been developed that could be the first Tricorder ®.
The new analyzer developed by Oxford Medical Diagnostics, identifies patients with diabetes by a totally radical approach. First, the specimen required is not blood but the breath of the patient, and the metabolite measured is not glucose but acetone.
Why acetone? Because that is the pathology of diabetes mellitus, the body is unable to utilize carbohydrates for energy, so it has to burn fat. One of the by-products of this process is ketone bodies, acetone being one of them. The presence of acetone in the breath could be indicative of diabetes, measuring the amount of acetone in the breath could determine how severe the diabetes is out of control.
Diabetes is not the only disease that Oxford Medical Diagnostics is using this new breath technology to diagnose. Going to their website, it can be seen that many pathological conditions may be diagnosed and treated using breath technology.
The basis of the technology is spectrometry, taking a vapour, vaporizing it and then measuring the spectra released to determine the chemical makeup of that vapour. This is actually ironic, since this use to be the technology used to measure serum sodium and potassium, until it was replaced with ion selective electrodes (ISE).
It will be interested to see where this technology will lead in the field of diagnostics. Quality control and proficiency testing will be challenging. Can this technology be used in Tight Glycemic control (see Dec.9th, 2009 posting).
This is definitely an exciting breakthrough, medicine may be closer to McCoy’s Tricorder ® then we realize.