Pancreatic cancer has a very low survival rate with just 9% of patients surviving 5 years or less. A large contributing factor to this is that there is no visible symptoms and by the time it is discovered the cancer is already very advanced. But researchers at the University of Washington have hopefully invented an accurate way to test the early signs of cancer, by themselves.

An app called BiliScreen may well be the way to discovering pancreatic cancer early, by using a smartphone’s camera, it uses computer vision algorithm to detect the chemical bilirubin in the whites of a persons eyes.

This is important because with pancreatic cancer, bilirubin levels start to increase and eventually turn a persons whites of their eye turn yellow, in which case the cancer is already highly developed. Cheaper and a lot easier than a blood test, BiliScreen is able to detect the levels of bilirubin and warn a user if their levels are abnormally high.

The app must be used in a special box to block out ambient light, or paper coloured glasses that the app is calibrated too. Biliscreen is said to be 90% accurate as a blood test, in identifying concerning levels of bilirubin when tested with a 70-person clinical study.