Newsight is developing COVID testing by saliva

An Israeli company, Newsight Imaging announced recently a COVID testing by saliva based on spectrum analysis.

This test has passed the preliminary clinical trial and is now entering the later stage, which has attracted the attention of many medical institutions and companies all over the world. This technique only needs to extract a small amount of saliva from the tester, which is convenient to operate, short in time and low in cost. It is estimated that after the large-scale production, the price of each saliva detector is less than US$ 200, and the cost of each detection is as low as US$ 0.25. With the accumulation of test data, we expect "saliva test" to screen out "asymptomatic infected persons" quickly and accurately in the future.

On August 13th, local time in Israel, Sheba Medical Center, the largest medical institution in Israel that jointly developed this technology with Newsight, also published this novel coronavirus "saliva test". During the test, the testor subjects drank some physiological saline in their mouths, and then vomited back to the reagent bottle for taking samples. The samples were put into the testing machine and connected with electricity, and the test results were displayed on the computer screen in less than one second.

According to Mr. Erez Lev, head of the spectrum business of Newsight, "This testing method does not require laboratory scenes, and can be tested at home, at the airport, in the theater, in the workplace, and can be carried out quickly in any scene. Large-scale testing." Different from the most common nasopharyngeal swab test at present, "saliva test" mainly analyzes the saliva of the test subject after extraction. The testing equipment is concentrated in a small box only slightly larger than the palm of your hand. After connecting to the computer, the computer screen can give the results immediately after spectral analysis in the detection box and based on a large amount of data accumulated in the early stage and artificial intelligence algorithm. Preliminary clinical trials show that the accuracy of "saliva test" has reached 95%.

This magical spectral analysis and detection method mainly relies on NSP2020, a chip independently developed by Newsight. In this kind of spectral analysis solution, the ultra-accurate spectral characteristics of each band in the range of 400-1100 nm can be identified and analyzed, which is the basis of water monitoring, home real-time virus and remote health detection equipment scheme. As a matter of fact, Newsight is an advanced CMOS image chip develop and design company, and its chip performs equally well in the field of machine vision imaging besides spectral analysis. The chip of this company has excellent performance, such as high frame rate (100K per line), AI feature, flexible switching of multiple configuration sets (customers can freely configure camera mode, laser 3D mode and pure ambient light mode between frames), and energy accumulation in pixels to realize signal enhancement output, etc. In addition, the Newsight chip can support multi-line triangulation imaging, and has its own patented eTOF™ technology (enhanced-Time-Of-Flight), which can acquire a full-resolution depth imaging scene more accurately and meet the needs of robots, automobiles, mobile phones and other fields.

At present, SpectraLIT™️ is a development kit based on Newsight chip spectrometer scheme, which can identify any spectral features with wavelength between 400-700 nm, and only use light to produce detection results in a few seconds. The next generation SpectraLIT™️ can support spectral detection with wavelength between 400-1100 nm, and this toolkit will provide instant, portable and low-cost diagnostic equipment for those diagnostic detection companies to enter the market.

Just as Ms. Zhao Xuemin, Director of Newsight and Executive Vice President of Infinity Capital, commented on the company: "We are very optimistic about this Israeli startup. First of all, they have the advantages of cutting-edge technology and CIS chips with high frame frequency, which have won many "firsts" in the industry. Secondly, from automatic driving, machine vision, spectral water quality detection to virus detection, Newsight is very good at seizing market opportunities in different fields. The company always maintains high sensitivity and flexibility to the market and is always ready to meet new challenges.” Recently, the company is actively planning the Research & Develop Center in Zhuhai, let's look forward to more new technologies and products coming out!