How To Help Malaria Sufferers Without Using Patents: Crowdsourcing Diagnosis
from the working-together dept
A little while back we wrote about Nathan Myhrvold's sniffy comment that if you're not doing anything to help people suffering from malaria, you have no right to criticize his patent troll operation, Intellectual Ventures. As we also noted, this argument is rather undermined by the fact that his research involves such deeply impractical solutions as "photonic fences" and using magnets to make mosquitoes explode.
If lives are to be saved here and now, and not in some patent-encumbered fantasy world tomorrow, what we need is a rather different approach that works with resources that are available and cheap today. Perhaps a crowdsourced solution like this:
Background: There are 600,000 new malaria cases daily worldwide. The gold standard for estimating the parasite burden and the corresponding severity of the disease consists in manually counting the number of parasites in blood smears through a microscope, a process that can take more than 20 minutes of an expert microscopist's time.
Digitized blood sample images were placed on a Web site, and then people were invited to count the parasites in each. A special algorithm was used to combine the analyses from several visitors to produce a better collective detection rate. It seems to work:
Objective: This research tests the feasibility of a crowdsourced approach to malaria image analysis. In particular, we investigated whether anonymous volunteers with no prior experience would be able to count malaria parasites in digitized images of thick blood smears by playing a Web-based game.Results: Over 1 month, anonymous players from 95 countries played more than 12,000 games and generated a database of more than 270,000 clicks on the test images. Results revealed that combining 22 games from nonexpert players achieved a parasite counting accuracy higher than 99%. This performance could be obtained also by combining 13 games from players trained for 1 minute.
That's pretty impressive. And unlike bonkers ideas such as "photonic fences", this crowdsourced approach requires little beyond bandwidth for distributing images and enough people participating. Putting the two together potentially allows huge numbers of blood samples to be checked for the presence of malaria infection with high accuracy once the system has been refined to include additional factors like parasite species and growth stages. That makes this approach scalable -- crucially important when there are over half a million new cases of malaria each year. The same can hardly said about using magnets to make mosquitoes explode.
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Filed Under: crowdsourcing, malaria, patents
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/s
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Galaxy Zoo
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Can't a computer do this?
P.S. I just patented "method and process for identifying malaria parasites on a computer."
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You sure they're not trying to make a low budget syfy movie, lol?
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Re: Can't a computer do this?
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Numbers Discrepancy
[...]there are over half a million new cases of malaria each year.
Which one is accurate?
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Re: Can't a computer do this?
Computers are a long way away from figuring out images with 99% accuracy and they are certainly a long way away from 'training' that you describe.
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A quick check at WHO reveals they claim in 2011 there were 216 million cases. 600,000 * 365 = 219 million.
I'm guessing the first number is about as accurate as these numbers get.
The half million probably refers to the number of deaths each year.
Makes banning Zen magnets look pretty stupid.
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Re: Numbers Discrepancy
500,000 = half a million
600,000 > 500,000
I'd like to thank my second grade teacher, Mrs. Schaefer for the valuable skills that allowed me to perform this difficult mathematical comparison.
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Re: Re: Numbers Discrepancy
These stats from WHO claim over 200 million cases worldwide in 2010 with an estimated 655,000 deaths.
http://www.who.int/features/factfiles/malaria/en/index.html
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Instead of Patents
Those calling for their taxes to be raised (Warren Buffet, George Soros and their ilk: http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterjreilly/2012/12/11/warren-buffett-and-george-soros-want-higher-esta te-tax-than-obama-proposes/) should instead create a Billionaire Prize Club for non-patented cures to malaria, HIV, etc.
If Buffett is so insistent that he has too much money (he is stealing Oregon state taxes via PGE: http://www.tax.com/taxcom/taxblog.nsf/permalink/uben-8ek28b?opendocument), he should at least be more philanthropic with his ill gotten gains. What a douche…
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Re: Re: Re: Numbers Discrepancy
Based on the 2010 number and basic math that would be roughly 550,000 cases a day in 2010.
Also, the paper cited in Glyn's article references a lot of sources from 2012, so it appears they are using more recent numbers.
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Re: Can't a computer do this?
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Re:
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Re: Instead of Patents
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Don't be an entitled life pirate.
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Re: Instead of Patents
- You only need look in a mirror, there will a huge one.
"If Buffett is so insistent that he has too much money"
- I don't recall him ever saying that
"he should at least be more philanthropic"
- Perhaps you should research a topic prior to commenting
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Re:
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Re: Re: Instead of Patents
What a FU defending a Billionaire who owes back taxes…search Buffett+taxes
“Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Owes Taxes Going Back To 2002”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/29/warren-buffett-taxes-berkshire-hathaway_n_941099.htm l
“US Government Countersues Warren Buffett Company Over Unpaid Taxes”
http://michellemalkin.com/2012/03/10/us-government-buffett/
To avoid the raised taxes next year:
“Berkshire Hathaway buys $1.2 billion of its own shares at a price higher than what CEO Warren Buffett has said he'd pay.”
http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2012/12/12/berkshire-buffett-buyback/
Why has Buffett setup 90%+ of his estate to go to charity and not the govt?
He wants to prevent the Govt from taking what is his.
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Re: Re: Numbers Discrepancy
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