Improving urological diagnostics : designing a low-cost screening tool and developing tools for bladder cancer detection
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Urological diseases, including urinary tract infections, kidney stones, prostate cancer, and bladder cancer, represent a major financial burden on our healthcare system. I aimed to reduce these costs in several ways: 1) by reducing the cost of currently used screening tools; 2) by fabricating test targets for various bladder conditions, which will decrease the cost of and time needed to develop new diagnostic tools; and 3) by building bladder cancer detection tools to aid in early disease diagnosis. To reduce the cost of currently used screening tools, I designed and fabricated a low-power, low-cost, portable device capable of running the standard "Routine Urinalysis and Microscopy" (RUM) protocol. RUM, which involves chemical analysis via a semi-quantitative dipstick and review of the microscopic contents (e.g., red blood cells, white blood cells, crystals, and casts), is often the first step in diagnosing any urological disease. My device is designed to remove the many sources of user error that often plague dipstick testing and inhibit robust and accurate analysis. The dipstick testing is coupled with a low-cost microscope based on power-free filtration and oblique illumination, which enables visualization and quantification of microscopic components. Because the device is low cost and user friendly, it opens the door for urinalysis testing both at home and in low-resource environments. For test targets of various bladder conditions, I developed a multi-modal, disease-mimicking bladder phantom, which provides a realistic imaging environment for testing various aspects of optical systems and image processing algorithms before validation in real tissue. This access to a realistic imaging environment in the lab decreases the cost and time of development for new bladder-related diagnostic tools. Last, for bladder cancer detection, I designed a method for quantifying the local attenuation coefficient of tissue using optical coherence tomography, which has been shown to be an important parameter for many diagnostic, classification, and surveillance applications (including bladder cancer diagnosis). Due to constraints in the data collection process, the current method is only clinically applicable in ophthalmology. However, there is a clear path moving forward, which will expand the utility of the method for use in other organs, including the bladder.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2018; ©2018 |
| Publication date | 2018; 2018 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Smith, Gennifer |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Bowden, Audrey, 1980- |
| Thesis advisor | Bowden, Audrey, 1980- |
| Thesis advisor | Liao, Joseph |
| Thesis advisor | Pauly, John (John M.) |
| Degree committee member | Liao, Joseph |
| Degree committee member | Pauly, John (John M.) |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Electrical Engineering. |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Gennifer Smith. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Electrical Engineering. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2018. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2018 by Gennifer Smith
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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