Researchers across California are working to bring medical microscopes to our cellphones — and vastly improve field medicine.
You can use your cellphone to take pictures, get driving directions, and free imprisoned angry birds. And perhaps soon, analyze microscopic blood samples.
Three separate University of California research teams have each concocted a new technology that converts just about any handset with a decent camera into a mobile microscope. That’s a development that could have a huge impact on medicine in developing countries-allowing health care workers in shantytowns and rural villages far from a hospital to diagnose malaria, HIV, and other diseases on the spot.
All three teams of UC researchers are proceeding from the same insight: Medical labs and trained doctors are scarce in poor countries, but cellphones are practically everywhere. There are more than 5 billion mobile phones in use around the world, according to the International Telecommunications Union, and almost three-quarters of them are in developing nations. “Cellphones weren’t part of our vision originally, but they made our job vastly easier,” says Aydogan Ozcan, a UCLA electrical engineering professor.
Ozcan, a trim 33-year-old with neatly barbered brown hair and olive skin, left his native Turkey in 2000 to study in the U.S. and now runs a research center at the university. In his small sixth-floor office (the size is compensated for by sweeping views of the Getty Center nestled in the Santa Monica Mountains), Ozcan shows me the device he developed to piggyback on all those mobile phones.
It’s called LUCAS—a loose shortening of “Lensless Ultra-wide-field Cell Monitoring Array platform based on Shadow imaging.” It works like this: A square plastic housing, half the size of a matchbox, clips over the phone’s photo aperture. A health care worker puts a sample of blood, saliva, or other material onto a glass slide and slips it into the housing. Battery-powered LEDs attached to the device shine light through the sample. The light penetrates the semi-transparent cells and creates a pattern of “shadows” that are projected onto the phone’s CMOS sensor (the silicon chip that captures an image when you take a picture). Those patterns form a holographic image of each cell. Those images can then be sent over the wireless network to health care facilities where technicians can tell whether they show healthy blood, HIV antibodies, or waterborne parasites. The technicians then send their findings back. The whole gadget fits in the palm of your hand and costs only a few dollars.
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