A new app called PoopMD has been unveiled to help nervous new parents catch a telltale symptom of biliary atresia (BA) from the color of their baby’s poop. Said condition, which occurs in about one out of 14,000 newborns in the U.S., is the leading cause of liver failure in children and the number one reason for liver transplantation in children.

If telltale symptom of biliary atresia is diagnosed within the first 60 days of life, it can significantly improve outcomes and children are less likely to need a liver transplant later, according to Dr. Douglas Mogul, who oversaw the development of the app at the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center and HCB Health.

If telltale symptom of biliary atresia is diagnosed within the first 60 days of life, it can significantly improve outcomes.PoopMD is available for free for iOS and Android platforms, allowing parents to take a picture of the stool and categorize it with the help of the app. PoopMD also sends automatic reminders to parents to take pictures of the stool, and there’s also the option to send images to a pediatrician.

A small study of the app showing its effectiveness was published in PLOS One. It [study] involved seven pediatricians who viewed 34 photographs of pale-colored stool. They determined that 27 of the pictures were normal stool, and seven were deemed bile deficient, a red flag for BA.

Then, researchers brought in one expert and three lay people to view and analyze the same picture in different lighting conditions with a variety of smartphones. Even with the picture of the picture, PoopMD correctly identified all of the bile deficient stool samples and correctly identified 24 of the 27 normal stools. Three normal stools were misidentified as “indeterminate.”

[Via: MedCityNews]