There are thousands of apps for today’s smart phones – apps that make life easier or more entertaining. Now, from the University of Virginia, comes news of how iPhones helped solve a medical mystery that may be vexing doctors around the world. Sandy Hausman has that story.
Like many other hospitals, UVA’S medical center uses a network of pneumatic tubes to deliver blood samples to its central laboratory for testing. Garrett Mullins, a clinical chemistry fellow, says it’s like what he saw as a kid at the bank’s drive-through.
“I have fond memories, because that’s where all the candy would come from," he says.
But UVA’s network is much larger, making its way through buildings and under roads.
Most of the time, this system works well, but about a dozen samples a day suffered damage in transit. Red blood cells actually broke – releasing their contents leading to inaccurate test results. Professor of Pathology David Bruns theorized that at some point in their travels, some of the vials were subject to extreme pressure.
“We wanted to record the amount of force that the tubes experienced during their transit,” he recalls.
His colleague, Dr. James Harrison, suggested an iPhone could do the job, and Mullins produced an older model that could be used to test the idea. He found an app called SensorKinetics Pro that would allow the phone to measure forces inside the pneumatic tube, and using a second phone, he was able to record the trip.
“I use one as a light source," Mullins explains. "You know it has a little flashlight function on the back, and one has the camera function, and I videotaped the blood sample as it’s going through the pneumatic tube system.”
Dr. Bruns was amazed to see what blood samples coming from one part of the medical center were going through.
“It looks like it’s been in a blender – like you’re mixing up a margarita, with bubbles and froth and foam.”
Bruns, Mullins and Harrison shared their findings at a meeting of people who run clinical laboratories around the world and discovered they, too, had been troubled by damaged blood samples. Again, David Bruns.
“This presentation became sort of the talk of the town," Bruns says. "Even when I was at the airport leaving I was stopped by a professor from Memorial Sloane Kettering, who wanted to spend the next half hour talking about this, figuring out ways that she was going to investigation the problems they have.”
Their findings were also published in the journal Clinical Chemistry, and UVA is no longer shipping whole blood samples through the tubes from the most distant part of the medical center.