A new eye on the middle ear
A new device developed by researchers at MIT and a physician at Connecticut Children’s Medical Center could greatly improve doctors’ ability to accurately diagnose ear infections. That could drastically reduce the estimated 2 million cases per year in the United States where such infections are incorrectly diagnosed and unnecessary antibiotics are prescribed. Such overprescriptions are considered a major cause of antibiotic resistance. The new device, whose design is still being refined by the team, is expected ultimately to look and function very much like existing otoscopes, the devices most doctors currently use to peer inside the ear to look for signs of infection. But unlike these conventional devices, which use visible light and can only see a few millimeters into the tissues of the ear, the new device instead uses shortwave infrared light, which can penetrate much deeper. The findings are being reported this week in the journal PNAS, in a paper...