Smart toilet may soon analyze stool for health problems
Artificial intelligence tool can be used for long-term tracking and management of chronic gastrointestinal ailments
2021-05-22
(Press-News.org) Bethesda, MD (May 22, 2021) -- An artificial intelligence tool under development at Duke University can be added to the standard toilet to help analyze patients' stool and give gastroenterologists the information they need to provide appropriate treatment, according to research that was selected for presentation at Digestive Disease Week® (DDW) 2021. The new technology could assist in managing chronic gastrointestinal issues such as inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and irritable bowel syndrome (IBS).
"Typically, gastroenterologists have to rely on patient self-reported information about their stool to help determine the cause of their gastrointestinal health issues, which can be very unreliable," said Deborah Fisher, MD, one of the lead authors on the study and associate professor of medicine at Duke University Durham, North Carolina. "Patients often can't remember what their stool looks like or how often they have a bowel movement, which is part of the standard monitoring process. The Smart Toilet technology will allow us to gather the long-term information needed to make a more accurate and timely diagnosis of chronic gastrointestinal problems."
The technology can be retrofitted within the pipes of an existing toilet. Once a person has a bowel movement and flushes, the toilet will take an image of the stool within the pipes. The data collected over time will provide a gastroenterologist a better understanding of a patient's stool form (i.e., loose, normal or constipated) and the presence of blood, allowing them to diagnose the patient and provide the right treatment for their condition.
To develop the artificial intelligence image analysis tool for the Smart Toilet, researchers analyzed 3,328 unique stool images found online or provided by research participants. All images were reviewed and annotated by gastroenterologists according to the Bristol Stool Scale, a common clinical tool for classifying stool. Using a computationally efficient approach to convolutional neural networks, which is a type of deep learning algorithm that can analyze images, researchers found that the algorithm accurately classified the stool form 85.1 percent of the time; gross blood detection had an accuracy of 76.3 percent.
"We are optimistic about patient willingness to use this technology because it's something that can be installed in their toilet's pipes and doesn't require the patient to do anything other than flush," said Sonia Grego, PhD, a lead researcher on the study and founding director of the Duke Smart Toilet Lab. "An IBD flare-up could be diagnosed using the Smart Toilet and the patient's response to treatment could be monitored with the technology. This could be especially useful for patients who live in long-term care facilities who may not be able to report their conditions and could help improve initial diagnosis of acute conditions."
The prototype has promising feasibility, but it is not yet available to the public. Researchers are developing additional features of the technology to include stool specimen sampling for biochemical marker analysis that will provide highly specific disease data to meet patients' and gastroenterologists' needs.
INFORMATION:
DDW Presentation Details
Dr. Fisher will present data from the study, "Automated stool image analysis by artificial intelligence in a smart toilet," abstract Sa652, on Saturday, May 22, at 12:15 p.m. EDT. For more information about featured studies, as well as a schedule of availability for featured researchers, please visit http://www.ddw.org/press.
Digestive Disease Week® (DDW) is the largest international gathering of physicians, researchers and academics in the fields of gastroenterology, hepatology, endoscopy and gastrointestinal surgery. Jointly sponsored by the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases (AASLD), the American Gastroenterological Association (AGA) Institute, the American Society for Gastrointestinal Endoscopy (ASGE) and the Society for Surgery of the Alimentary Tract (SSAT), DDW is a fully virtual meeting from May 21-23, 2021. The meeting showcases more than 2,000 abstracts and hundreds of lectures on the latest advances in GI research, medicine and technology. More information can be found at http://www.ddw.org.
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
2021-05-22
Tokyo, Japan - Researchers from Tokyo Metropolitan University have been quantifying how different batches of mesenchymal stem cells respond to the mechanical stiffness of their environments. They focused on how certain proteins were "localized" in cell nuclei and found key trends in how this changed with stiffness. Their findings explain inconsistencies between previous findings and may guide how scientists control the state of stem cells for research and medical treatments.
Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) are important "progenitor" cells that can transform into muscle, cartilage, bone or fat cells. In 2006, pioneering work by Engler and coworkers showed that they could control what cell type mesenchymal stem cells ...
2021-05-22
Nearly half a billion people on the planet have diabetes, but most of them aren't getting the kind of care that could make their lives healthier, longer and more productive, according to a new global study of data from people with the condition.
Many don't even know they have the condition.
Only 1 in 10 people with diabetes in the 55 low- and middle-income countries studied receive the type of comprehensive care that's been proven to reduce diabetes-related problems, according to the new findings published in Lancet Healthy Longevity.
That comprehensive package of care ...
2021-05-22
Business shutdowns reduce COVID-19 deaths, though with rapidly diminishing returns, with study of Italian lockdowns estimating they saved over 9,400 lives in under a month.
INFORMATION:
Article Title: Closed for business: The mortality impact of business closures during the Covid-19 pandemic
Funding: The author(s) received no specific funding for this work.
Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
Article URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0251373
...
2021-05-22
Plant diseases don't stop at national borders and miles of oceans don't prevent their spread, either. That's why plant disease surveillance, improved detection systems, and global predictive disease modeling are necessary to mitigate future disease outbreaks and protect the global food supply, according to a team of researchers in a new commentary published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The idea is to "detect these plant disease outbreak sources early and stop the spread before it becomes a pandemic," says lead-author Jean Ristaino, William Neal Reynolds Distinguished Professor of Plant Pathology at North Carolina State University. Once an epidemic occurs it is difficult to control, Ristaino says, likening the effort to the one undertaken ...
2021-05-22
Neurotic personalities found the pandemic most traumatic, while agreeable and conscientious personalities offered protection from the pandemic's negative impacts.
INFORMATION:
Article Title: Which personality traits can mitigate the impact of the pandemic? Assessment of the relationship between personality traits and traumatic events in the COVID-19 pandemic as mediated by defense mechanisms
Funding: The author(s) received no specific funding for this work.
Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
Article URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0251984
...
2021-05-22
Simon Fraser University researchers have validated a faster, cheaper COVID-19 test that could kickstart the expansion of more widespread rapid testing. Study results have been published in The Journal of Molecular Diagnostics.
"This research offers a cheaper, faster alternative to the most reliable and sensitive test currently used worldwide, without sacrificing sensitivity and reproducibility," says molecular biology and biochemistry professor Peter Unrau, who led the team evaluating the COVID-19 test kit.
The researchers suggest the test could be deployed in remote locations, clinics and airports due to its ease of use and portability.
The microchip real-time PCR test can provide ...
2021-05-21
To meet soaring demand for lightning-quick mobile technology, each year tech giants create faster, more powerful devices with longer-lasting battery power than previous models.
A major reason companies like Apple and Samsung can miraculously pull this off year after year is because engineers and researchers around the world are designing increasingly power-efficient microchips that still deliver high speeds.
To that end, researchers led by a team at Brigham Young University have just built the world's most power-efficient high-speed analog-to-digital converter (ADC) microchip. An ADC is a tiny piece of technology present in almost every electronic piece of equipment that converts analog ...
2021-05-21
For decades scientists have been puzzled by the formation of rare hyper-enriched gold deposits in places like Ballarat in Australia, Serra Palada in Brazil, and Red Lake in Ontario. While such deposits typically form over tens to hundreds of thousands of years, these "ultrahigh-grade" deposits can form in years, month, or even days. So how do they form so quickly?
Studying examples of these deposits from the Brucejack Mine in northwestern British Columbia, McGill Professor Anthony Williams-Jones of the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences and PhD student Duncan McLeish have discovered that these gold deposits form much like soured milk. When milk goes sour, the butterfat particles clump together to form a jelly.
Q&A with Anthony Williams-Jones and Duncan McLeish
What did you ...
2021-05-21
A team of researchers led by scientists at UC Santa Cruz analyzed data from 3,212 camera traps to show how human disturbance could be shifting the makeup of mammal communities across North America.
The new study, published in the journal Global Change Biology, builds upon the team's prior work observing how wildlife in the Santa Cruz Mountains respond to human disturbance. Local observations, for example, have shown that species like pumas and bobcats are less likely to be active in areas where humans are present, while deer and wood rats become bolder and more active. But it's difficult to generalize findings like these across larger geographic areas because human-wildlife interactions are often regionally unique.
So, to get a continent-wide ...
2021-05-21
Free access to essential medicines increases patient adherence to taking medication by 35 per cent and reduces total health spending by an average of over $1,000 per patient per year, according to a two-year study that tested the effects of providing patients with free and convenient access to a carefully selected set of medications.
The findings, published May 21 in PLOS Medicine, come as advocates urge Canada to carve a path toward single-payer, public pharmacare. Canada is the only country with universal healthcare that does not have a universal pharmacare program.
A group of researchers led by St. Michael's Hospital of Unity Health ...
LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:
[Press-News.org] Smart toilet may soon analyze stool for health problems
Artificial intelligence tool can be used for long-term tracking and management of chronic gastrointestinal ailments
