Payal Keswarpu

A simple and accurate method for estimating bilirubin from blood

The presence of large number of modern methods (devices and papers published discussing issues and challenges with existing methodology) for the determination of bilirubin in the blood (plasma) indicates the difficulties of estimation and suggests the need for simpler yet reliable method. Also hospital turn-around time between obtaining a blood sample and receiving results from a central clinical laboratory often slows the pediatricians management of healthy and hyperbilirubinemic neonates and results in delaying the discharge of mother and child from the hospital thereby increasing the healthcare cost. Furthermore, the most frequent cause of hospital readmissions for the neonates is due to rebound jaundice caused due to inefficient assessment of the hyperbilirubinemia. In view of the importance of bilirubin levels in the diagnosis and treatment of neonatal jaundice, a portable bilirubinometer with accuracy similar to clinical method of evaluation is needed. This paper provides the outcome of the research groundwork (literature & product survey) and technical output (system design, experimental setup, results) in realizing a point-of-care bilirubinometer based on the serum analysis.

Dynamic illumination based system to remove the glare and improve the quality of medical images

Medical images taken from camera based devices (e.g. laparoscope, colposcope, retinoscope, etc) are greatly affected by numerous bright reflection spots (called glare or specular reflections). This may affect the visibility of the abnormal features (if present in the glare locations). We have developed a novel solution to overcome this problem by incorporating a multi-LED lighting solution. This will intelligently and rapidly switch on and off the LEDs in a pattern that dynamically and geometrically shifts/shuffles these glare spots back and forth in the image such that every glare-affected area of a single image frame can be reconstructed from a few adjacent time-frame images. We have built the prototype that successfully demonstrates how the glare problem in the medical video/image can be satisfactorily solved, significantly enhancing the accuracy of this vital procedure in the diagnosis of diseases. We achieve 65-95% reduction in specularity on phantom model using the proposed approach.