Judit Giró Benet, the inventor of the Blue Box, is a Spanish biomedical engineer, who with 24 years has achieved the prestigious James Dayson Award. His invention is a reliable method of diagnosing breast cancer using a urine sample and artificial intelligence. A reliable method, without pain, or radiation and without leaving home, with a cost ten times less than a mammogram.
Prevent and detect with the Blue Box
“This is a box, it is a box that has sensors inside that are sensitive to certain chemical compounds that are present in the urine if the person has breast cancer. Unfortunately, all families are going to have at least one case at some point, but here the good news is that if it is detected early, many times it can be cured. That is, the survival rate of women with breast cancer is highly proportional to whether the detection has been early. so if we really manage to optimize the box to the maximum, to be able to detect breast cancer in its initial stage, then it can have an impact. And that is what motivates my team and me. “
A great time for biomedical engineering
“Right now, being a biomedical engineer is super fun. It’s a great time for medicine and biomedical engineering because Artificial Intelligence (AI) is being applied well in medicine. When you have an Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithm on your computer it What happens is that your software is smarter than you. So you have to train it, you have to drive it and see where it goes. “
Train the algorithm
“Here, in the end, the only limitation that Artificial Intelligence (AI) has is how many samples you can get to train the algorithm. That is, how many hospitals you can convince to join the study and give you urine samples from patients. This Summer we are going to start a series of clinical studies between California and Catalonia in which we are going to go to hospitals to collect urine samples and use them to train our Blue Box. That is our most imminent goal. “
“Europe is a place where a lot of resources, a lot of funds are being allocated to innovation right now. In other words, setting up a branch in Europe is super necessary. We have to be there where biomedicine is being done; in Europe and in the United States. . “
A little context and other questions
For Judit, it all started being inspired by the acute sense of smell of dogs that are capable of detecting cancer … On other occasions, she has pointed out that women’s health is the great forgotten … For this reason, she chose to start with breast cancer. The complexity of the female body, with its cycles, has been his object of study. This Blue Box can help tens of thousands of women thanks to an easy and early diagnosis.
Technology is decisive in his invention: Sensors that capture information, data that travels via Bluetooth to mobile phones and the cloud, an algorithm that works through Artificial Intelligence (AI) … Biomedicine is progressing rapidly and this invention could be used later to find other types of cancers.
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