In the U.S. nearly 2 million cases per year are incorrectly diagnosed and unnecessary antibiotics are prescribed causing, antibiotic resistance.

‘About 2 million children every year are incorrectly thought to have ear infections as diagnosis is difficult with a conventional otoscope.’

The findings are being reported in the journal PNAS, in a paper by Moungi Bawendi, the Lester Wolfe Professor of Chemistry at MIT; Jessica Carr, an MIT doctoral student; Oliver Bruns, an MIT research scientist; and Tulio Valdez, a pediatric otolaryngologist at Connecticut Children's Medical Center and associate professor of otolaryngology at the University of Connecticut. 




The one clear diagnostic sign of an infection in the ear is a buildup of fluid behind the eardrum, Carr explains. But the view through a conventional otoscope can't penetrate deeply enough into the tissues to reveal such buildups. More expensive specialized equipment can offer more information needed for a firm diagnosis, but these tools are usually only available in the offices of specialists, who are not consulted in the vast majority of cases.
"A lot of times, it's a fifty-fifty guess as to whether there is fluid there," Carr says. "If there's no fluid, there's no chance of an infection. One of the limitations of the existing technology is that you can't see through the eardrum, so you can't easily see the fluid. But the eardrum basically becomes transparent to our device." Fluid within the ear, by contrast, "becomes very dark and very apparent."
While there are more advanced systems under development that do provide data on these deeper parts of the ear, Carr says, those "haven't been widely adopted. They're not familiar to the physicians, who have to use a whole range of technologies in their work. These are something new and unfamiliar, and some of these devices require a trained audiologist to run them." So the MIT team worked to make the new device as familiar as possible, closely resembling the otoscopes that doctors already use.
"We developed something easy to use, and that wouldn't require much training," she says.
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The roughly 4 million incorrect diagnoses are about evenly split between false positives and false negatives, indicating that about 2 million children every year are incorrectly thought to have such infections, and are prescribed unnecessary antibiotics. Once the presence of an infection is determined, doctors must then try to distinguish between viral and bacterial causes, something this device cannot determine, although it can provide some clues.
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Source-Eurekalert