glossing...

Article mentions existing tools e.g., MasSpec Pen, which detect signals of interest in samples with minimal processing (i.e., avoiding the hard part of processing/cleaning bio samples). But those were specific cancer signals that stood out from the general protein noise. (See also the cancer knife, that burns to cut and analyzes the smoke to see if you have enough margin).

Problem with bacteria is (a) wide diversity and (b) previous work was mostly on lipids, not small molecules. For small molecule metabolites of bacteria, previous article reported a medium-size proof of concept (hundreds of target), and this is doing more (thousands), where they identify a few hundred unique patterns and then demonstrate their detection.

At 90%, it's likely this would be used for pre-screening to identify possible candidates, though it might reinforce initial clinical suspicion and preliminary antibiotics.

Incredibly capable mass spectrometers can be had for half a million. Plenty of undergrad labs have access to one. A student quality single quad is <$100k.

Sure, but then they'd have a million(s) dollar machine (plus the people trained to operate it) waiting for these critical cases. It's a cost / benefit tradeoff, just like whether to use an MRI or CAT scan vs x-rays or an echo.

This is a false dichotomy.

It doesn't have to be used for every patient, and it doesn't have to be kept around waiting for Doctor House's third act. There is nothing stopping you from a middle ground.

In the US, this is already handled by prior authorization.

/s

Soon resident here: not really super critical to know the exact pathogen. There are classes of antibiotics and depending on many factors we can have a good estimate of what will work so the first try usually helps. What's usually done (at least in france) is:

1. Take some blood to send to the labs to grow bacterias

2. Only then IV of antibiotics

3. Adjust at day 3 when you get the results.

And what if it looks super severe en urgent? Then 1. we do that too because it's often impossible to know what the pathogen was once you IVed all the antibiotics. And 2. we start by wide spectrum super strong high dose antibiotics.

Example: purpura fulminans: 1g of 3rd gen cephalosporins.

Ymmv in other countries, especially the USA because IIRC you have selected tons of emergent pathogens.

Aren't there are also operating cost ? What you said is just depreciating cost of the machine.

That’s assuming the machine works 24/7 matching marching perfectly the demand. I’m not a doctor but I guess it’s a seasonal "business" with more demand when cold winter starts, back to school September, epidemic episodes…

I would also wonder whether cultures are compatible with mass spec, and what the bottleneck is on measurement.

Culturing for optical microscopy seems like you need 1-10 DAYS before you get enough of a colony going to identify things, assuming you can successfully culture them at all. What if you plopped your culture down on the fermenter and gave it three hours (very cheap! Parallelizable!), then threw it in the mass spec? Would that shorten mass spec measurement time?

A good MRI machine is way more than $500k!

There are 0.05 Tesla MRI machines that almost work with a normal 15A 110V outlet now FWIU; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40965068 :

> "Whole-body magnetic resonance imaging at 0.05 Tesla" [1800W] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adm7168 .. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40335170

Other emerging developments in __ spectroscopy:

/?hnlog Spectro:

NIRS;

> Are there implied molecular structures that can be inferred from low-cost {NIRS, Light field, [...]} sensor data?

NIRS would be low cost, but the wavelength compared to the sample size.

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38528844 :

> "Reversible optical data storage below the diffraction limit (2023)" [at cryogenic temperatures] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38528844 :

> [...] have successfully demonstrated that a beam of light can not only be confined to a spot that is 50 times smaller than its own wavelength but also “in a first of its kind” the spot can be moved by minuscule amounts at the point where the light is confined.

"Eye-safe laser technology to diagnose traumatic brain injury in minutes" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38510092 :

> "Window into the mind: Advanced handheld spectroscopic eye-safe technology for point-of-care neurodiagnostic" (2023) https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adg5431

> multiplex resonance Raman spectroscopy

Holotomographic imaging is yet another imaging method that could be less costly than MRI; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40819864

"Quantum microscopy study makes electrons visible in slow motion" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40981054 :

> "Terahertz spectroscopy of collective charge density wave dynamics at the atomic scale" (2024) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-024-02552-7

This is doing correctly what the car company did wrong. They start with a system that does not have a fatal incident upon failure. Meaning that even 1% or 10% failure rate is totally fine and possibly positive in terms of ROI.

On the other hand, even 0.01% is not acceptable when the system is responsible for human lives.

I also believe that cameras and visible spectrum are scalable and sufficient, and there is evidence it is so. The most reliable system driving cars is the homo sapiens and apart from a bit of proprioceptive, vehicles are operated based on vision sensors(eyes).

To conclude, I find it a clever move to start refining the technology in a field where ROI is in dollar terms and not in lives saved.

To the found: Good luck, i am jealous.

It could be used for disease control and not necessarily personal health care. You could use something like the plant thing if it worked for people by photographing an entire stadium of people and finding infected people, airport entry lines, etc.

> B/W cameras and AI.

You forgot multi-spectral. That means single hires images for a lot of frequency ranges, which is better than a single color image, which merges together all frequencies at once.

In the end the accuracy of detections, false-positives, false-negatives wins. And this not comparable to this certain car company which refuses to use proper sensors. we also do infrared, 3d pointclouds to get the angle at each pixel, and thermal imaging.

another neighbor of us is doing real-time imaging for face detection, which is the industry leader world-wide. They can install a lot of cheap cams in football stadiums and give you a list of all 80.000 people, when they have access to the government passport/driver license photo database. they have. but they cannot detect virus infections as we can do. nor bacterial infections. only if they do something illegal. who threw a bengal fire or started a fight.

A reason for bw cam is sensitivity. No bayer filter means you capture all the photons. There are cameras that are sensitive enough to count photons as well. When I was in the lab we used EMCCD cameras (electron multiplier ccd) that we used to detect very low signals from cells (we wanted to be nice to them, if you hit them with UV light they don't like that).

There are all kinds of really great hacks to eke out an extra couple % at this level, if you consider you're counting photons. Back thinned, reverse mounting, high bandwidth multichannel readouts. Most of those trade offs are a thing of the past, but in the 2000s we were hacking the beans off those cameras to get them to do stunts for us.

Things are fast good AND cheap now though!