This comes from using LEDs added to the phone and uses software to analyze. I had to look at this twice and the add on for the phone is only around $10.00. They are working on finding out how to identify smaller viruses but feel a device like this one could be used to diagnose malaria easily. Being the phone is wireless the diagnosis could be sent immediately. What is amazing is that there is no lens required. The cell phone is going to be answer to almost everything in the future it seems! Will we someday be doing our own imaging too? BD
To picture the next-gen microscope, don't picture a microscope at all. Aydogan Ozcan, an assistant professor of electrical engineering and member of the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA, is adapting cell phones to sample biological images.
This is no iPhone app. Ozcan, who formed the company Microskia (on the heels of the UC Berkeley team that developed CellScope), has built a prototype whose cell phone camera sensor can detect a slide's contents at a cellular level--reading, for example, an increase in white blood cell count that might indicate a new infection or injury. That information can then be forwarded wirelessly to a lab or hospital.
The brilliance of Ozcan's design is that magnification is done electronically, requiring no lens. (CellScope, on the other hand, takes a more conventional approach as a miniature microscope with expensive lenses.)
Ozcan simply added LEDs to the phone, and those diodes direct light over the sample, which is analyzed in front of the camera sensor. The resulting hologram is recorded by the camera as a collection of pixels, and can be reconstructed through Ozcan's software into highly detailed images.
The applications for this kind of affordable and mobile device abound. Screening for malaria is a big one, or monitoring someone's white blood cell count throughout chemotherapy.
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