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When it comes to having cancer screening tools, the more the merrier. However, there’s one type of cancer, which by all means needs a majority of such tools, and that is pancreatic cancer.
The reason for this is that this type of cancer doesn’t get detected early as it barely shows any kind of symptoms and comes to fore only when little to nothing can be done, so it would have progressed immensely. In fact, as per data, the rate of survival of at least five years in the case of pancreatic cancer is merely 9%.
The good news is that now according to scientists, they have come up with a new smartphone app that thoroughly scans the white part of one’s eye, which can actually reveal a lot about pancreatic cancer as it denotes one of the early signs of it.
In most cases, patients suffering from pancreatic cancer die because the ailment cannot be detected until its final stage surfaces, where the only option that remains is to surgically remove the tumor, however, because of the frailty that this final stage is enveloped in, that option can often not be executed.
Thus, the only way to deal with this is through early detection, one of which has the symptom of showing characteristics of jaundice, wherein one’s skin and eyes get a yellowish tinge due to the spread of bilirubin in the blood.
The smartphone app here, known as Dubbed BiliScreen is said to detect any elevated essence of bilirubin by scanning the white part of the eye, medically known as the sclera, without the need of extracting any body fluids.
The app is decked with computer algorithms as well as machine learning and helps detect any signs of persisting bilirubin, way before it is visible to the naked eye, because if latter is the case, then it is already too late.
In a clinical study that consisted of a total of 70 people, the app was able to detect the concerns of 89.7% in comparison to the other alternative of a typical blood test, just with a selfie.
From here on, the team is looking forward to trying this on a larger group and see how the results turn out to be, especially when they do this with people at risk of jaundice or other ailments.