Project Description: 

Over 1.5 billion people worldwide suffer from soil-transmitted helminthiasis (STH), a parasitic disease that is spread via soil. STH can lead to negative health outcomes such as intestinal obstruction, blood loss, and hindrance of physical and cognitive development. The current Kato-Katz method takes a stool sample, passes it through a mesh strainer, places it on a microscope slide template, and is finally read by a lab technician who manually counts the number of parasitic eggs present in the sample. One major issue that prevents Kato-Katz from being a viable option of STH eradication is that it does not allow for accurate detection of low-intensity STH infection (i.e. counting samples where there are very few eggs). This is partially due to the high human error associated with manual counting. Another issue with Kato-Katz is that it leads to severe analyst fatigue. The process to prepare and analyze a slide takes up to 40 minutes per sample. Our solution is a compact portable device called the ParaViewer. It allows for accurate egg detection across all levels of infection intensities. We aim to minimize the amount of time lab technicians have to prepare and plate slides with our new plating method. With the ParaViewer, the procedure to plate a sample only takes an average of 1 minute and 6 seconds, which is around a quarter of the time it takes to complete Kato-Katz for two slides. Once the slide is inserted into the device, images can be captured with a mobile device for analysis at a later time and even in another part of the world. We are excited to bring this Paradigm shift to the STH diagnostics market that has not seen innovation since 1972.