Vietnam Medic Makes Homemade Endoscope

Davian writes "As reported by the BBC a Vietnamese doctor has managed to create an endoscope using an apparatus consisting of lenses and a webcam, linked to a Pentium 4. Total cost of extra hardware - less than $1000." The doctor plans to also assist other local hospitals that are facing similar budgetary contraints.

Ehh?

[domipheus]

This is not meant to be a flame or troll activity, but surely if they wanted to keep the costs down they would not be using windows? Seems simple enough.

I'm also feeling quite odd about the pentium 4 ad statement there. It is connected to a computer, they can all do graphics manipulation these days. Seems we are still in the 'omgwtf pentium' age. Using another cpu would bring the price down yet further!

This is what patent law is for

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

Tomorrow some american company will sue him (and this will cost them a LOT more than $30000 * number of provinces in vietnam up front).

Gotta love this world we live in. Can't have people without money cured too, because if we do cure them, why would people with money pay for treatment ?

Just a thought

Where was this when I was networking the house?!

[Riddleshome]

This would have be REALLY useful when I networked the house - there were a couple of snags that if I could have seen round the bend... Ah well, what's wrong with a few more holes in the walls...

the most important part

[gotpaint32]

The most important part of an endoscope, that being the scope still needs to be bought. Now if the guy made the actual scope and not just the webcam adapter for the scope, then that would be truly impressive. once again i feel misled by slashdot because the title suggests the guy actually built an endoscope out of a webcam. Shame on you slashdot

Re:This is what patent law is for

[Patrik_AKA_RedX]

That's the part I've never understanded about the US. On one hand the US is ultra-religious. But on the other hand helping the poor is totaly unamerican (socialism is baaaaaaaad). Now what I don't get is this: is the US hypocritical (a lot of talking, but noone really meaning what they say) or is this a case of a splitten personality? (radical differences in oppinion)
This isn't meant as flamebait or anti-americanism or something. It's just strange that a society that holds on to religion in so many ways, seems to disagree with a major portion of it.

Safety and health

[bibi-pov]

Ok, he managed to make a cheap endoscope. That's good and bad at the same time. Because a endoscope's purpose is to be inserted inside your body, especially inside supposedly sick bodies, it has to be steril so as to avoid contamination (AIDS anyone ?). Using an expensive endoscope (like in developped countries) forbids to use it once and dispose it. So endoscope are cleaned the best one can do without damaging it and re-used. This can lead to contaminations (in fact it's a cause for blood bank to refuse your blood). That's why a cheapper endoscope could be great for developped countries (on-time usage). But on the opposite it's not so great for second/third-world contries because I doubt a webcam is designed to withstand the heat, uv, and/or chemical used to clean the expensive endoscope, nor will it be disposed after use because cheap isn't there. This could be a major health problem. So I'm somewhat skeptical on the path taken by this doctor.

open equipment?

[inmate]

i really think there is great potential for good works here.

a good friend who is a midwife, is going to work in rural portugual next year, and will be involved in opening a community-based birth-house. (sorry, i don't know what a geburtshaus is in english)
but some of the equipment that they need, such as a CTG machine, cost upward of euro2500!
i've seen this machine, and it's nothing special. but it has lots of dedicated equipment that could easily be replaced by generic computer equipment.

this also got me wondering about creating some sort of open DIY medical equipment repository.
seeing this article, i can well believe that a lot of people could benefit from such openly available research!

Re:$30,000 versus $1,000

[Anonymous Coward]

truth be told, that $30k price-tag is mostly profit for the med-co's currently stiffing american hospitals out of cheap, quality, medical equipment.

I work for an American MRI manufacturer, testing magnets that are sold to hospitals for around $1,000,000 a pop.

The magnets are labelled "Made in USA" but are in fact only assembled here, using components from China, Mexico, and Burma... very very cheap components. All told, it costs the company less than $10,000 in materials, and around $200,000 in labor and energy to assemble and test each magnet, including liquid helium costs. The FDA would kick up a shitstorm if they knew what we were putting in these supposedly "top quality" devices. But so far, we've only sent in special runs of our systems using premium components for their evaluation.

Of course, these magnets are barely passing their tests. Some aren't, but we are expected to pass them regardless so our revenue stream keeps flowing in the right direction.

It should be obvious why I'm posting as an Anonymous Coward. Now you hopefully have an even clearer picture of what the healthcare business is all about. (Hint: It rhymes with funny, but isn't.)

Here's the stupid thing...

[a_nonamiss]

I'd put down my life savings right now that says US hospitals (even the poorest and most destitute) will continue to buy the $30,000 one.

That's what's wrong with the US healthcare system. "Why do something cheap when we can spend even more money for something just as useful?"

Endoscopic Image Capture

[Centurix]

I was the designer and developer of a major endoscopic image capture system here in Australia for a company who sold thousands of copies in the UK, US and parts of Asia. A lot of the difficult work at the time wasn't actually capturing the images and storing them, that was relatively easy, VfW did a lot of the work on most video capture boards, even though it didn't give you as much control over the video overlay as you really wanted. Some video cards provided MCI drivers which gave much more control, zoom, pan etc. Like the Matrox capture cards. All video endoscopic systems provided some sort of analog video output, composite, S-Video, RGB. The major systems were Olympus, Fujitsu and Pentax with a few minor players in specialty endoscopic fields.

The hard part was actually remotely triggering the capture on the PC. We initially tried to get the specialists to tell a PC operator to press a button, but they just got frustrated with the whole procedure.

Our next thing was to use the buttons on the scopes themselves (the flexible scopes have two dials for lateral movement and usually one or more buttons which can be assigned to various functions on each unit) so we slowly begged and borrowed one of each model of each type of scope unit so we could create interfaces to plug into them.

Myself and a colleage researched over 100 units, measured signals, found suppliers of connectors, found manufacturers who could copy proprietary connectors (and there were about 30 different types of custom connectors in the end) and then wrote the code.

We started using it for upper endoscopy and colonoscopies, but it was sold for ERCP's, MRI/PET/CAT scanning, rigid scope procedures and also for overhead cameras in surgery.

It's an interesting field, I personally sat in on over 200 procedures to test the software, colonoscopies being the worst. Not great a procedure. I'm glad they give people drugs to make them forget that 15 minutes...

Re:Pah...

[Nuclear Elephant]

I've got some friends in the medical industry, and it's seriously bloated financially - this is probably the same hardware that costs $100,000, but without the label on it. One company I know of who builds X-Ray machines charges $500 for a "specially formatted" floppy disk to be used with their equipment. A floppy disk!! You can make your own by simply using 'dd', but doctors are too dumb to know this. It's not just the patients who get screwed, paying $8 for an asprin - it's the entire industry. This is cool, one definite way to say "shove it up uranus", and have almost identical equipment as you would have paid otherwise.

Need scope, go Airforce

[Raindeer]

A Dutch F16 technician ones showed me the boroscope they were using to check the insides of the engine. He told me that a couple of weeks before a surgeon of the local hospital had been cursing when he saw the scope. The surgeon had been requesting a boroscope for three years already and couldn't get the funds allocated and here the local AFB had a couple on hand.

Re:This is what patent law is for

[gabba_gabba_hey]

As a side note - America's disdain for socialism is rooted in the innate distrust of government and a belief in the "American Dream."

However, the majority of the populace will happily bend over and take it from a government with hugely broadened powers in the name of "the War on Terrorism" or whatever they've decided to call it these days. Omnipotent giant goat with 37 eyes forbid that we help some lazy orphans though.

I consider myself a patriot at least as far as my interpretation of the ideals of this country goes, however, after traveling and speaking with people the majority of whom who I consider to piss all over the precepts of this place I think maybe I just have to go. There is a new tide. People no longer care about anything. As long as they are comfy, let the corps destroy their livelyhood and buy their freedom away from the government. Kill kill kill - hoooray!! it's a brave new fucking world. grrr....

Re:Slightly offtopic weak troll

[vidarh]

Newsflash for you: "Aggregating other sites content and piggybacking on their journalism" is what Slashdot has been doing since day one.

Some submitters have delusions of grandeur and try to write something around it (which generally tends to be inaccurate or blatantly wrong, or at least annoying), others just cut and paste a paragraph or so from the article.

If you don't like that, then why are you reading Slashdot in the first place?

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Re:Pah...

[Detritus]

The problem is that even if you win, you may still be stuck with hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal bills if it goes to trial.

Plaintiff's lawyers are well aware of this, and often use it to extort settlements from the defendant's insurance carrier.