American and Ghanaian experts have created a smartphone app that can detect anemia in children from images of eyes and lips. Photo: File
Ghana: American universities have developed an app to assess anemia in children in a simple and easy way, which has been tested in the African country of Ghana, and it has produced excellent results.
Experts from the University of California Los Angeles, Associated Hospitals and the University of Ghana have used smartphone images to accurately predict iron deficiency in children, potentially benefiting hundreds of millions of children each year. This app is named ‘New SCB’.
Especially poor and disadvantaged countries can benefit from this new method. This process is not painful, complicated and time-consuming in any way, but its algorithm predicts the disease with just a few images of the face and eyes. Thus it shows results within minutes which can be very impressive. The details of this research have been published in the website called Public Library of Science.
The app has also been successfully tested in Ghana to predict jaundice in children, after which it can now also show anemia. This is because jaundice and iron deficiency are very common in children in poor countries like Ghana. This data is expected to further improve the app.
We know that if there is less than the prescribed amount of hemoglobin in the blood, it is defined as anemia. This not only slows down the baby but also leads to more complications due to insufficient blood and oxygen supply to the organs.
Initially, 43 children under the age of four were evaluated in Ghana. In it, photographs of the whites of the eyes, lower lips and lower eyelids were taken on the children’s faces. The app soon triggered anemia in some children. This was further confirmed when routine blood tests were done on these children. Thus the app showed hemoglobin deficiency with about 90% accuracy.
Interestingly, the app can also show the severity and severity of anemia.
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