Because high resolution mass spectrometers cost millions of dollars, and "minutes" for a diagnosis can mean that one spectrometer can only run 3 samples per hour - or 72 per day.
And while a research university can afford a million dollar spectrometer (and the grad students that run it), even a small hospital will create 72 bacterial swaps per hour - while absolutely not having the money to get 10 spectrometers with the corresponding technicians.
And the incumbent/competitor - standard bacterial cultures - is cheap!
Who cares if they need to charge $30k per patient to use it if that fast knowledge saves the patient’s life. It doesn’t need to fully replace the existing methods, but could be a useful supplement when a patient is in critical condition
At 1 million/year ( worst case ), that’s roughly 3k/day so 40 dollars / analysis using your numbers . Assuming the machine lasts a bit longer ( say 5 years ) that’s 8 dollars/analysis, assuming 20min/sample. Make it a bit faster (5 minutes) and you’re down to two dollars which doesn’t look super expensive to me.
Only vision scales. We did mass spectromity in Formula 1 because we had the money and it doesn't need to scale.
The nice thing about mass-spec is that you can use it as a dragnet detection method.
I don't know how I'd feel about reliable precision tools in human healthcare being substituted with B/W cameras and AI. It reminds me of a certain car company, where the human lives lost aspect wasn't so liked, even if they saved some money.
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.
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. In 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 something illegal. who threw a bengal fire or started a fight.
*visible to the human eye
see https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5631018/ , and this company that is commercialising it https://microbira.com/
timetobuild•5h ago
prox•5h ago
pbmonster•4h ago
Very possible they're doing the research now, because one of the mass spectrometer companies has gotten ISO 13485 certified and can now offer the spectrometer for diagnostics in humans as a medical device manufacturer.
WJW•4h ago
"In recent years, matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionisation-mass spectrometry (MALDI-MS) has been rapidly adopted in clinical practice to identify bacteria based on unique protein profiles6,7. However, while the identification process itself is faster, MALDI-MS-based analysis suffers from the same time-consuming isolation step as traditional approaches. Time, however, is a decisive factor in the successful treatment of several infection scenarios such as sepsis4,8. Consequently, the ideal scenario of microbial diagnosis is to identify bacteria directly from the clinical sample. Using MALDI, so far only a small number of applications could be implemented due to the high protein background in most clinical samples9."
While mass spectrometry is an old(-ish) method, only recently has it become good and fast enough for clinical use. They also needed to make their own database of bacterial byproduct signatures to look for, as that did not exist yet.
As to "why just now": not everything has been invented yet, even things that might seem relatively straightforward.
w10-1•4h ago
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.
shakna•4h ago
Having one spare for research is not the norm, any more than having one is.