DEF CON 25 BioHacking Village - Louis Auguste Jr - Microscopes Are Stupid
Channel: DEFCONConference
Date: 30/10/2017

Why can't microscopes diagnose disease? What if they could? For the past four years our team from NYU Tandon School of Engineering has been building an IoT system capable of turning a standard microscope into a digital imaging tool. And the goal is to connect every laboratory in the world into a global network.

We call our device the Auto Diagnostic Assistant, or ADA, in honor of Ada Lovelace, who likely died from undiagnosed cervical cancer. We think the biohacking village will enjoy learning about ADA because it is an extremely low cost microscope accessory capable of accomplishing the same tasks that were previously only able to be accomplished with whole slide imaging devices. Perfect for biohackers looking to save, share, study and analyse images of specimens from their microscope.

Our team is comprised of hardware engineers, software devs and machine learning computer scientists and our mission is to make diagnosis faster and easier. We have validated the accuracy of our mWSIs (mobile Whole Slide Images) with a pre-clinical study and presented our research as a poster at USCAP (United States and Canada Anatomical Pathology Conference). Additionally we published our original methods for creation of digital slides in the British Medical Journal (though the secret sauce has changed since then.)

The hardware prototype of ADA won an award for best hardware led social innovation from the ASME in 2015. Currently, we are launching our beta trial in India with the support of the US Department of State and the Indian Department of Science and Technology. We are actively looking for beta testers in the US as well and would be happy to provide one unit for free to a visitor or member of the biohacking village.