Hi, it's Bryce Dallas Howard here, guest hosting today on TED Talks Daily.

Here's a talk from Ted Fellow and immunoengineer Aaron Morris.

He's innovating on the future of medical testing by diagnosing disease from devices within the body.

Ow!

As anyone who stubbed a toe in the dark or spent an hour searching for their keys knows,

we're often limited by what we can or cannot see.

In fact, even our own bodies can be black boxes.

Today, I want to take you through a vision of health care that scientists and engineers, myself included, are building.

We are creating a diagnostic lab inside your body that can provide a continuous analysis of your health so that we can better see what's happening in patients.

Currently, if someone is sick, we may diagnose them by using a

biopsy to bring disease tissue outside the body, where we can see it. We do this if we suspect,

for instance, that a growth might be cancerous. Unfortunately, this approach can't work all the time

because of two major problems. First, some tissues, like brains or spinal cords, can't be routinely

biopsied. And second, doctors often don't know which tissue is causing the problem, so they

don't know what to biopsy. So far, we've dealt with these issues using external medical tests,

like MRIs or blood tests. These provide a broad overview of the health of a patient, but they can't

see the molecular and cellular changes that occur within tissues, and they certainly can't

provide enough information to proactively treat patients before symptoms develop. This is unfortunate

because it's these invisible changes that ultimately cause disease. Our inability to measure these changes results in a disparity

between what we can see on a test and what we know is happening in patients.

Let's take multiple sclerosis as an example.

In MS, which is an autoimmune disease,

...