Mobile Phone-Based Light Microscopy and Image Analysis
A group of researchers at UC Berkeley has developed a portable, mobile phone-based light microscopy system (PLoS) for rapid computer-assisted analysis of clinical specimens in parts of the world where quality lab equipment or trained personnel are not available.
a) Optical layout (b) Current prototype (c) Brightfield image of fluorescent beads. (d) Fluorescent images of beads shown in (c).
Counterintuitively, in these parts of the world, excellent cell phone service is often available. From the article:
. . . we have built a mobile phone-mounted light microscope and demonstrated its potential for clinical use by imaging P. falciparum-infected and sickle red blood cells in brightfield and M. tuberculosis-infected sputum samples in fluorescence with LED excitation. In all cases resolution exceeded that necessary to detect blood cell and microorganism morphology, and with the tuberculosis samples we took further advantage of the digitized images to demonstrate automated bacillus counting via image analysis software.
Software on the phone can catalog and analyze the images, and important data can be gathered for epidemiological purposes. Another quote:
Not only could such a mobile phone microscopy system help alleviate the problems of inadequate access to clinical microscopy in developing and rural areas, but it would provide those areas remote access to digital record keeping, automated sample analysis, expert diagnosticians, and epidemiological monitoring – the latter enhanced by the ease of location-tagging patient data by cellular triangulation or GPS location data.
(a) Thick smear of Giemsa-stained malaria-infected blood. (b) Thin smear of Giemsa-stained malaria-infected blood. (c) Sickle-cell anaemia blood.
This is an awesome idea.
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