Project Description: 

Gastrointestinal (GI) bleeding is one of the most common problems encountered in healthcare with over 500,000 patients per year in the US being admitted to the hospital from upper or lower GI bleeding. Current standards of care to diagnose and locate a GI bleed include endoscopies and colonoscopies, which are highly invasive and can result in a misdiagnosis, or fecal occult blood tests, which are deficient in differentiating the blood in stool as melena for an upper GI bleed or hematochezia for a lower GI bleed. Therefore, over the past decade, there has been a rising interest in developing devices to detect and locate the bleed in the GI tract. Despite progress, gastroenterologists and emergency physicians continue to rely on unreliable methods such as medical histories and physical examinations to detect the location of bleeds. Thus, there is a clinical need for a multidisciplinary approach to detect blood in stool and diagnose it as an upper or lower GI bleeding. Here, a novel device analyzing stool samples through chemical testing and an image-based algorithm was developed to detect blood in stool and indicate the bleed location in the GI tract. The Blue Blood Scanning Box uses three chemical tests based on a color ranging scale to detect the minimum concentration of blood in stool followed by a color detection method to diagnose an upper GI bleed if turned purple and a lower GI bleed if converted to blue. The device then implements an algorithmic strategy to image the colored sample and output, within seconds, the differential diagnosis of an upper or lower GI bleed. Based on the results from multiple bench-top studies, the Blue Blood Scanning Box is a solution to precisely locate an upper or lower GI bleed rapidly, accurately, and non-invasively.