How is NuTec different from other clinical tests?
NuTEC is envisioned as a single device diagnosing many diseases as opposed to many individual tests in the hospital each diagnosing a single disease.
How do NuTec signatures work differently from individual tests?
The two are not mutually exclusive. Signatures allow you to ask the open-ended and unbiased question: ‘Is there a problem?’ However, if you have a specific question such as ‘Do I have diabetes mellitus?’ a specific test for glucose levels would make more sense.
Does NuTec detect DNA, RNA, proteins or small molecules?
NuTec is unbiased and reacts with all 4 classes. The resulting spots on the NuTec are not DNA, RNA, proteins and small molecules but rather the colorimetric products of these chemical reactions.
How is the NuTec signature generated?
A mixture of molecules in a sample applied to the NuTec undergoes chemical reactions upon heating which then result in a visual pattern of dark and light spots. By design, each spot on the NuTec reacts differently with the sample molecules. Physicochemical diversity among the spots is important for NuTec to search through a large enough chemical space in the sample. This diversity is the basis for generating the spot pattern.
What is the NuTec signature?
The NuTec signature is analogous to a hash function. A hash function takes information of arbitrary length (e.g. a large image file) and generates an output signature with a drastically smaller length (e.g. a string of 32 characters). The NuTec is the chemical version of a hash function. Just like a hash function, NuTec takes dimensionally large chemical information in a sample and reduces it to a chemical hash of X defined spots. Hash signatures are a great way of telling if a file downloaded off the internet matches the original. In the same way, Entopsis will be matching your chemical hash signature to a database of pre-validated hashes.
Are there other current approaches using signatures and how is NuTec different?
What sets NuTec apart from other platforms is the chemical hash concept. Chemical hashing does several things. It transforms chemical information into colorimetric information which can be acquired by a scanner or phone camera. It lets NuTec survey a chemical space which is unimaginably complex. The resulting hash signature is compact and easily amenable to database storage and template matching.
Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA)
United States legislation took a step into the future in 2011 by passing the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA). The FSMA shifts the focus from a after-the-fact reactionary approach to a preventive approach. One might not expect it but the toll exacted by foodborne diseases is large. 1 in 6 people in the United States (that’s 48 million people) suffer from foodborne diseases each year. Thousands die and these deaths are needless. The shift to prevention is timely. What the FSMA does is to make food companies responsible for monitoring and preventing contamination.
Food companies will now need a
Infinite circle series
Here’s a fascinating puzzle by Presh Talwalker. Given an isoceles triangle and an infinite series of circles fit within the triangle as depicted below, what is the sum of circumferences of all the circles? Think about it and when you are ready for answer, read on. Draw a line down the center of the triangle and through all the circles. This line is the sum of diameters of all the circles and is given by the Pythagoras Theorem. The sum of circumferences is therefore: The puzzle ends here but an even cooler result is implied by the above. If you
WIRED cites Entopsis in the context of IoT
Scott Amyx from WIRED Magazine just wrote a fascinating article on the intersection between AI (Artificial Intelligence) and various data-driven technologies. He asked the intriguing question: ‘Could NuTec glasses be equipped with IoT sensors to optically scan and transmit signature data to the cloud remotely?’ This is precisely something we would like to see happen in the future and we are working on an image acquisition framework that will make this a reality.
