MIT Technology Review January 5, 2024
Smartphone apps can differentiate between tuberculosis and other respiratory conditions. It’s part of an AI-driven trend: using sound to diagnose illnesses.
This week I came across a paper that uses AI in a way that I hadn’t heard of before. Researchers developed a smartphone app that can distinguish tuberculosis from other diseases by the sound of the patient’s cough.
The method isn’t foolproof. The app failed to detect TB in about 30% of people who actually had the disease. But it’s simpler and vastly cheaper than collecting phlegm to look for the bacterium that causes the disease, the gold-standard method for diagnosing TB. So it could prove especially useful in low-income countries as a screening tool, helping to catch cases...
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