Traditional medical imaging works great for people with light skin but has trouble getting clear pictures from patients with darker skin. A Johns Hopkins University–led team found a way to deliver clear pictures of anyone’s internal anatomy, no matter their skin tone.
In experiments the new imaging technique produced significantly sharper images for all people—and excelled with darker skin tones. It produced much clearer images of arteries running through the forearms of all participants, compared to standard imaging methods where it was nearly impossible to distinguish the arteries in darker-skinned individuals.
Appreciate this deep dive. Worth adding that there is a detectable bit of extra mortality and morbidity with fingertip pulse oximeters when testing darker-skinned folks. The devices usually face the same issue as smartwatches. This interferes with timely treatment for acute and chronic symptoms of COVID and other conditions which cause lowered blood oxygen concentrations.
Supposedly the tech was out there to solve it, but it was expensive enough that medtech manufacturers hadn’t ever bothered making compatible devices at a scale to serve most patients or consumers.
You’re definitely correct about the pulse ox. That has also been known for a long time though. COVID just brought it to the public’s attention.
I’m not sure that there is any alternative tech though. Pulse ox work by measuring the color of the blood at specific wavelengths.
I can’t imagine that there’d be anything that non invasive around.
If you know of a citation, I’d be really interested.
Dr. Google yielded this good roundup of tech from around when I recall reading about it, near the end of the public health emergency. https://www.darkdaily.com/2023/05/22/innovators-develop-multi-analyte-pulse-oximeters-that-accurately-read-oxygen-levels-in-people-with-darker-skin-pigmentation/
Thanks!
Here is the most scientific version of this I could find from that article. I’ve got work to do, but I’ll try to come back later to add something else.
There shouldn’t be any barriers to entry for this. It won’t be as cheap, but NIRS is not prohibitively expensive.
This is just really new. It takes lots of time for completely novel medical devices to enter the clinic.
This is also vastly more advanced than a pulse ox.
It was some sciencey site reporting on a journal article, I’ll see if I can find it again. Don’t remember the tech beyond a dim impression that it was “more emitters, different wavelengths, higher energy”