IP Requirements:

• Emory IP

Experience Requirements:

• Will depend on direction of the project

The wait time to see a gastroenterologist can be months to a year given the increased need for gastrointestinal (GI) disorder evaluations and increased demand for colon cancer screenings. Likewise, it can be challenging to get an appointment with a primary care physician for evaluation of symptoms leading to many patients using emergency departments for work-up of non-emergent GI diseases. For patients with symptoms such as diarrhea, abdominal pain, or abnormal variation in stool patterns, a delay in receiving diagnosis and treatment can be detrimental to the patient’s health as well as cause distress to the patient.

Many tests for stool analyses exist, including many commercialized tests that detect blood in the stool, infectious etiologies of diarrhea (e.g., tests for parasitic, bacterial, and viral infections), and inflammation, which can lead to the correct diagnosis and treatment. However, there are no at-home tests available that have the capability to test for all of them at once, and physicians typically must spend time individually ordering each test after the patient has been seen in the clinic. This further leads to delays as the patient must then have the stool tests completed and then the physician will have to review the results at a later time.

The goal of this project is to design an at-home stool analysis test that has the capability of screening for multiple GI disorders at once. Ideally, the analysis test could be programmed to only utilize certain tests based on the patient’s symptoms, and then the data could be digitally available to physicians prior to the initial appointment to facilitate next steps for diagnosis and treatment at the time of the appointment.