Who cares if they need to charge $30k per patient to use it if that fast knowledge saves the patient’s life. It doesn’t need to fully replace the existing methods, but could be a useful supplement when a patient is in critical condition
It doesn't have to be used for every patient, and it doesn't have to be kept around waiting for Doctor House's third act. There is nothing stopping you from a middle ground.
/s
1. Take some blood to send to the labs to grow bacterias
2. Only then IV of antibiotics
3. Adjust at day 3 when you get the results.
And what if it looks super severe en urgent? Then 1. we do that too because it's often impossible to know what the pathogen was once you IVed all the antibiotics. And 2. we start by wide spectrum super strong high dose antibiotics.
Example: purpura fulminans: 1g of 3rd gen cephalosporins.
Ymmv in other countries, especially the USA because IIRC you have selected tons of emergent pathogens.
Also because you're still with us so it probably worked.
In any case I'm glad you're better and sorry you had to go through this.
At 1 million/year ( worst case ), that’s roughly 3k/day so 40 dollars / analysis using your numbers . Assuming the machine lasts a bit longer ( say 5 years ) that’s 8 dollars/analysis, assuming 20min/sample. Make it a bit faster (5 minutes) and you’re down to two dollars which doesn’t look super expensive to me.
Culturing for optical microscopy seems like you need 1-10 DAYS before you get enough of a colony going to identify things, assuming you can successfully culture them at all. What if you plopped your culture down on the fermenter and gave it three hours (very cheap! Parallelizable!), then threw it in the mass spec? Would that shorten mass spec measurement time?
> "Whole-body magnetic resonance imaging at 0.05 Tesla" [1800W] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adm7168 .. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40335170
Other emerging developments in __ spectroscopy:
/?hnlog Spectro:
NIRS;
> Are there implied molecular structures that can be inferred from low-cost {NIRS, Light field, [...]} sensor data?
NIRS would be low cost, but the wavelength compared to the sample size.
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38528844 :
> "Reversible optical data storage below the diffraction limit (2023)" [at cryogenic temperatures] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38528844 :
> [...] have successfully demonstrated that a beam of light can not only be confined to a spot that is 50 times smaller than its own wavelength but also “in a first of its kind” the spot can be moved by minuscule amounts at the point where the light is confined.
"Eye-safe laser technology to diagnose traumatic brain injury in minutes" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38510092 :
> "Window into the mind: Advanced handheld spectroscopic eye-safe technology for point-of-care neurodiagnostic" (2023) https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adg5431
> multiplex resonance Raman spectroscopy
Holotomographic imaging is yet another imaging method that could be less costly than MRI; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40819864
"Quantum microscopy study makes electrons visible in slow motion" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40981054 :
> "Terahertz spectroscopy of collective charge density wave dynamics at the atomic scale" (2024) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-024-02552-7
The only mass specs I think of costing multiple millions of dollars are accelerator mass spectrometers (AMS) which are meant for isotopic analysis.
Because high resolution mass spectrometers cost millions of dollars, and "minutes" for a diagnosis can mean that one spectrometer can only run 3 samples per hour - or 72 per day.
And while a research university can afford a million dollar spectrometer (and the grad students that run it), even a small hospital will create 72 bacterial swaps per hour - while absolutely not having the money to get 10 spectrometers with the corresponding technicians.
And the incumbent/competitor - standard bacterial cultures - is cheap!