New Kind of Low-cost Cell Phone Microscope

An engineer at University of California, Los Angeles has found a way to convert a cell phone into a microscope capable of diagnosing diseases. The gadget, though reminiscent of CellScope developed by a team at UC Berkeley, is a much cheaper but accurate diagnostic tool using only $10 of off-the-shelf hardware and a cell phone, reports New York Times.

Professor Aydogan Ozcan, inventor of the cell phone microscope, has already formed a new company named Microskia to bring this technology to the market. The device is made to offer a simple and affordable solution to screening diseases for people living in remote places, where hospitals, health facilities and diagnostic laboratories are rare and faraway.

The cell phone add-on utilizes a phone’s sensor to analyze the content on a slide, such as blood sample, and transmits the information wirelessly to a hospital or regional health center for further evaluation. For example, the device can detect the asymmetric shape of diseased blood cells or other abnormal cells, or note an increase of white blood cells, which is a sign of infection. The system will be particularly useful in screening for illnesses such as malaria.

For cell phones that are not equipped with a camera, the company has also discovered various ways to make them perform the tasks without any lenses. For instance, a simple box with a sensing chip can be plugged into a handset or laptop with a USB cable, turning the mobile device into a microscope that detects diseases.

"Dr. Ozcan’s devices provide a simple solution to a complex problem," commented Ahmet Yildiz, an assistant professor at the UC Berkeley. "This is an inexpensive way to eliminate a microscope and sample biological images with a basic cell phone camera instead."

With its extremely low cost, high portability and quick disease-assessing ability, this gadget would clearly be beneficial to the global health care field. Meanwhile, it paves the way for other breakthroughs in the mobile industry in the future.

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