The Ozcan Group Uses Online Gaming for Telepathology Project

Associate Professor Aydogan Ozcan together with his research group and the David Geffen School of Medicine developed a crowd-source online gaming system to diagnose malaria infection on blood cells.  The team worked with a crowd of 10-20 random individuals playing the game which resulted to a diagnosis of 1.25% accuracy rate made by trained medical professionals.

The game is played on a smartphone or personal computer by a pool of gamers.  More players in the game would improve the accuracy of the analysis.   The players are faced with a frame of blood cell samples and idea is to kill the “infected” cells with a “syringe tool” and keep the “healthy” ones.   The presence of control cell images, unknown to the player, would analyze the performance of the gamer.  The game results would determine the scale of infection in the blood.

The team in The Ozcan Research Group responsible for this project is Dr. Sam Mavandadi, as the study’s first author with other authors: Stoyan Dimitrov, Steve Feng, Frank Yu, Uzair Sikora, Oguzhan Yaglidere and Swati Padmanabhan.  The Ozcan Group has been actively developing applications of the cell image study of blood samples through a regular smartphone back when they initially launched LUCAS in 2009 which attracted high commendation and funding from NIH, NSF, Darpa, AFOSR, ONRST, Vodafone and The Okawa Foundation

Associate Professor Ozcan speaks about the game.  Read the full story.