A 22-year-old just invented a 3D scanner that detects heart disease in 90 seconds. WYD?

A 22-year-old college dropout named Peeyush Shrivastava is trying to streamline a specific type of medical test in an effort to save time and money during their stay.

The specific problem Shrivastava and his team are tying to solve is how doctors examine patients with chest pain, which is the leading cause for an ER visit that results in discharge for adults 45 and older. This comes from a study by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.

CNN looked at the scope of the problem:

“A recent study in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine showed that extensive testing combined with an overnight stay can take as long as 28 hours. And the mean cost for chest pain visits is estimated to be $1,527 per patient, with a total of nearly $7 billion in direct costs for treating chest pain across all American hospitals, according to a 2015 study.”

Doctors treating chest pain have to identify whether the issue is a cardiac or non-cardiac issue. Shrivastava says he wants to make that a much easier process, telling CNN, “Five years from now, we want to be known as the ER standard for ruling in or ruling out cardiac chest pain versus non-cardiac chest pain.”

Shrivastava’s story began as a high schooler when he interned at a lab at Ohio State that looked at the molecular biology of the heart. After high school, Shrivastava enrolled at OSU and with his friends Vineet Erasala and Manny Setegn, started a company called Genetesis.

After dropping out of school, Shrivastava and his team identified an issue: The tests doctors have to perform on patients with chest pain in order to rule out a more serious problem are complicated and cause patients and hospitals precious time and money.

So Shrivastava and co. have come up with a 3-D scanner that will quickly map out a rendering of the patient’s heart for inspection.

From CNN:

“Shrivastava says his company’s scanner, called Faraday, can dramatically speed up that process, do it more accurately and make it more comfortable for the patient. It uses artificial intelligence to create thousands of 3-D maps of a patient’s heart to tell doctors what is, or isn’t, causing chest pain.”

Obviously when it comes to heart health, safety is a priority. You don’t want to use a medical tool that will cause further damage to an ailing heart, or hurt a completely healthy heart. Shrivastava assured CNN that his Faraday scanner has no negative side effects:

“The beauty of magnetic fields is, they are undistorted by the lungs, by the skin, so the signal you’re getting is very high-fidelity. It’s very pure. So you can hold sensors right above the chest and still get that high-quality signal. No radiation. No contact. No nothing.”

Dr. Margarita Pena of St. Johns told CNN that this technology could change the future of heart treatment:

“If accuracy comes through, it will be a game-changer. If it’s just as accurate as a stress test, it will cut down the patient’s length of stay, costs to hospitals, and it will be safer because it could cut down on risks like hospital-acquired infections, radioactive dye and possible treadmill injury… It’s like a super EKG.”

Right now, Shrivastava and his Genetesis team are securing investments and improving their technology, but their 3-D tech could provide doctors and patients with a crucial tool. Shrivastava outlined his vision for his company:

“We want this to be treated as the ER standard not just for chest pain or cardiac-related abnormalities. This is a technology that is not specific to any organ. Any organ that emits a magnetic field should be able to be mapped by our device.”

This could really be a game changer.