This TED Talk features technologist Julian Berkska, recorded live at TED-It-Mirk, KGAA, Darmstadt, Germany, 2018.

I have a tendency to assume the worst.

And once in a while, this habit plays tricks on me.

For example, if I feel unexpected pain in my body that I've

not experienced before and that I cannot attribute, then all of a sudden my mind might turn

a tense back into heart disease or calf muscle pain into deep vein thrombosis. But so far,

I haven't been diagnosed with any deadly or incurable disease. Sometimes things just hurt for no clear reason.

But not everyone is as lucky as me.

Every year, more than 50 million people die worldwide.

Especially in high-income economies like ours,

a large fraction of deaths is caused by slowly progressing diseases.

Heart disease, chronic lung disease, cancer, Alzheimer, diabetes, just to name a few.

Now, humanity has made tremendous progress in diagnosing and treating many of these.

But we are at a stage where further advancement in health cannot be achieved only by developing new treatments.

And this becomes evident when we look at one aspect that many of these diseases have in common.

The probability for successful treatment strongly depends on when treatment is started.

But a disease is typically only

detected once symptoms occur.

And the problem here is that, in fact, many diseases can remain as symptomatic, hence

undetected for a long period of time.

Because of this, there's a persisting need for new ways of detecting disease at early stage,

way before any symptoms occur.

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