A picture is worth a thousand words in all facets of life. But the value of images in the field of medicine is immeasurable. Doctors use images to learn about diseases and conditions and to assist with diagnosis. With the increasing use of smart phone cameras, doctors use images now more than ever to share information with colleagues at the bedside and within the hospital. But until very recently, there has not been a satisfactory way of organizing, annotating, saving, and sharing medical images across the profession.
That changed last week with the launch of Figure 1, the first crowd sourced photo sharing app designed specifically for health care professionals, and available free on the iTunes App Store. With Figure 1, health care professionals can upload and tag images and have the app automatically detect and block out patients’ faces to maintain privacy. Users have the ability to further block out other identifiers such as tattoos, and can add text and arrows to highlight specific aspects of the image.
The inspiration for Figure 1 came from Dr. Joshua Landy, Internist and Critical Care Specialist and cofounder of Movable Science, the Ryerson Digital Medial startup behind Figure 1. In his own practice, he was looking for an app he could use to speed up communication with other physicians who were frequently asking him to email or text images. He couldn’t find anything that fit the bill. Further, once an image was sent via email or text, it was essentially lost as an educational asset. “That’s a shame because so many of those images are compelling and have a high educational value. I wanted to harness all the images that physicians like me were sending around”, Dr. Landy said in a recent interview.
Dr. Landy uses the app in many ways, but one very helpful application is to send an image to a provider – a doctor he’s referring to for instance – in advance of that physician seeing the patient or prior to a case conference. Figure 1 could also be very useful tool for telephone consultations. The referring physician who is maintaining care could share images of the patient in question, along with the database of other comparable images compiled by other physicians. These images and diagnostic testing data could be shared with the consulting physician to yield better advice and medical opinion.
Ultimately, the goal of Figure 1, according to Dr. Landy, is to “create a free-access library of medical images that anyone can contribute to”. Like all crowd sourced applications, the more physicians who use the app, the more powerful the app becomes. So it’s exciting to see Movable Science announce on their Twitter feed that Figure 1 is now in the top 10 medical apps on the iTunes app store.
Figure 1 is currently available for the iPhone, and they plan to expand it to Android devices in the coming months.