By Josh Fischman From Scientific American

Doctors—and you, too—can listen to difference between healthy and malignant cells

The ear is quicker than the eye. People can detect changes in sound in a few thousandths of a second while their eyes need about a fiftieth of second to spot a change. This audio ability has prompted researchers to take information normally shown visually and turn it into sounds, a process called sonification. It allows researchers to pick up on differences at faster rates.

In medicine, for instance, audio can speed up the analysis of a cancer biopsy. Normally a pathologist looks at cells with an instrument that bounces light off their proteins. Cancer cells tend to have different proteins than do healthy cells, so the light looks different. But the changes are subtle and figuring them out can be time-consuming.

Ryan Stables, a musician and digital media technologist at Birmingham City University in England, working with an analytic chemist and a physicist, transformed these visual signals into audio sounds.

In tests, about 150 clinicians listened to pairings like these. They were able to accurately distinguish cancer cells from healthy cells 90 percent of the time. The researchers expect to begin testing this technique in doctor’s offices within the year. Their hope is to get accurate diagnoses to anxious patients quickly.

IMAGES
cancer cells Credit: National Cancer Institute via Wikimedia Commons
Screen shot – 00:0000:00 Here is a tone made by a healthy cell
00:0000:02 This, however, is the sound made by a cancer cell
00:0000:01 The tones can vary; it is the contrast that is important. This is another healthy cell.
00:0000:01 This is another cancer cell.

For more on this story and audio go to: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/detecting-cancer-by-sound-audio1/

Related story:
Our Ears Can Detect Cancer and Space Weather
By Ron Cowen From Scientific American
Ears are such terrific pattern finders that scientists are using audio data to detect cancer cells and particles from space
Composer Robert L. Alexander was sitting in front of his laptop computer about three years ago, listening to a sound file that would have put most people to sleep: it was a faint flapping, like a distant flag waving in a stiff breeze, repeated over and over, sometimes a little louder, sometimes quieter.

Alexander is a patient man, however. Forty-five minutes into his listening session, the flapping stopped, replaced by a sound like a wind roaring through a forest. It was, he recalls, “the mother of all whooshes.”

For more on this story go to: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/our-ears-can-detect-cancer-and-space-weather/