Inspiration
The current process of going to a doctor seems inefficient for us, because it involves too many unnecessary actions from a doctor. The whole US and WHO trend now is relying on minimizing the patient-doctor physical interaction. This has led us to the idea that we can help to optimize this process by creating a web app, which is used for sharing medical pictures, which can be used for coming up with a diagnosis.
What it does
It is a web service, which serves as a platform for uploading photos from medical devices, which can take photos, and a doctor would only need that photo and maybe the results of the physical exam to come up with a diagnosis. Some examples of such photos could be photos from a colposcope used to diagnose cervical cancer, from which about 450,000 women die each year. One more example could be diagnosing melanoma, papilloma, or birthmarks in dermatology. With that in mind, we have decided that a good idea would be to add an opportunity for several doctors to review the image and physical test results so that they avoid the possibility of making an error as much as possible. After several doctors (we were thinking of three) review the given data, the main one would come up with the final decision and submit the final diagnosis, which gets automatically sent to the patient. If the result is bad, the doctors can advice the patient to go to some clinic. Also, to completely eliminate the physical contact between a patient and a doctor, all the photos and physical exams can be done by a specifically trained nurse.
How we built it
We have used FERN (Firebase, Express.js, React.js, Node.js) stack to build this web app. We have used the mailgun API to automatically send emails, PostMan and swagger to document and test the API endpoints. We have used heroku to deploy this app.
Challenges we ran into
Learning Firebase was a big struggle for us since all our team has background in mongoDB and it was hard to transition into using Firebase. Also, we ran into some issues with the API, because we should have tested each endpoint right after it's creation, while we did it after creating all endpoints.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud of our front end since it's modern, minimalistic and easy-to-use. Moreover, we are proud that we have implemented an idea, which can change some people's lives.
What we learned
We have learned much about Firebase and about FERN stack in general. Also, we have learned more about full-stack web development in general and expanded our knowledge on how to choose the right web stacks and sufficient time-management.
What's next for Dr. Lab
1) We can add student accounts to it so that medical students can vied the photos, try to come up with a diagnosis and then see what a certified doctor has diagnosed. 2) We can adapt this product for the Africa market, so that doctors do not have to be physically present in an African country. 3) We can collect (of course only if the permission of a patient is given) the photos, classify them and provide for further research and training of machine learning models 4) We can improve the website itself and add a mobile component to the project 5) If talking about medical photo devices that store their images on a PC, we can create an electron app for the ease of using or even integrate the service with the interface of that device
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