A microscope add-on for your phone for just $10? No wonder it's winning awards.

Mobile phones have become one of the most universal pieces of advanced technology in the world, and they are about to become even more vital. Aydogan Ozcan of UCLA has developed a microscope attachment for a cell phone – turning the device into a sort of mobile medical lab. It’s both lightweight (~38g or 1.5 oz) and cheap (parts cost around $10). As described in the journal Lab on a Chip, the cellphone microscope can analyze blood and saliva samples for microparticles, red blood cells, white blood cells, platelets, and water borne parasites. Ozcan and his team have recently won three prestigious awards for the device: a Grand Challenges award from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (worth $100,000), the National Geographic Emerging Explorer award (worth $10,000), and the CAREER award from the National Science Foundation ($400,000). With these funds, Ozcan plans on starting case studies in Africa to see how the microscope can help revolutionize global medicine.

LUCAS cell phone attachment. Disposable slides (not pictured) would fit into the sample holder.

Ozcan isn’t the only researcher looking to combine cellphone and microscope, the Cellscope from UC Berkeley was developed with similar medical goals in mind. Yet Ozcan’s device stands out for its unique approach and success. Termed the Lensless Ultrawide field Cell monitoring Array platform based on Shadow Imaging (LUCAS), the microscope uses an LED to illuminate a sample and then analyze the sample’s shadow to get information. You can read more about that analysis in our original article on the device.

LUCAS’s main advantage over other systems is that it uses no lenses or lasers, so its very cheap and can fit into a small space with little weight. For just $10 you can put a microscope on a cellphone and turn it into a medical testing platform. A nurse or aid giver in the field takes a blood or saliva sample, places it into the device and sends the picture to an automated database which will return data on the required information (such as red blood cell count). That information can be used to diagnose the patient.

Ozcan describes some of the potential for the LUCAS microscope in the video below. It was taken when he won another award, this one from Net Explorateur, earlier in the year.

The LUCAS attachment for cellphones looks like one of those rare technologies which could make a significant impact quickly and effectively. Ozcan has already secured enough funding to field prototypes of the device around the world. It should start testing trials in the next year, allowing medical professionals in remote (and not so remote) places in Africa to analyze patients for diseases such as malaria. In Lab on a Chip, Ozcan’s team also demonstrated that LUCAS can identify a water borne parasite (in that case Giardia lamblia) which opens up even more possibilities for its use on the continent. If successful in its early trials, expect to see this $10 device popping up all over the globe.

Ozcan developed an USB version of LUCAS for use without a phone.

Ozcan has already filed patents and started a company, Microskia, in preparation for LUCAS hitting the worldwide market soon. Ozcan and his team have even developed a non-phone version of the device (perhaps the smallest such microscope in the world) which can be used with an USB connection. That microscope can also take density samples (there are associated gains in chemistry and biology for doing so) with a few dollars worth of add-ons.

In the long term, the successor technologies to LUCAS should basically transform your smart phone into a medical tricorder. Advanced diagnostic software, likely to be run off servers, would give anyone access to automated medical analysis for their blood and saliva. Such a device could become a valuable tool for everyone, not just those in remote locations, and could become as ubiquitous as the thermometer in your home. When combined with emerging medical artificial intelligence, such microscopes could transform mobile phones into limited household doctors. Such technology is probably still many years away, but Ozcan’s successes show that it could be arriving much sooner than you think.

[image credits: Aydogan Ozcan via UCLA News]
[video credit: NetExplorateur.org]
[source: Lab on a Chip, UCLA News]

$10 of hardware and you could get medical lab results in just five minutes. Insane!

In the field of global medicine, laboratories are a precious commodity. Yet even if a remote village doesn’t have access to a local lab or even a doctor, they may be able to get reliable test results…through a mobile phone. Professor Aydogan Ozcan at UCLA has been developing a series of attachments for phones that will act as microscopes, but without lenses. Using hardware that costs less than $10, these mobile microscopes will be able to use the shadows of cells to detect illnesses. Ozcan, through his new company Microskia, is trying to bring these attachments to market and connect them, via the mobile phone, to a database which will then text the phone with results in just five minutes! Doctors, or maybe anyone with a phone in the field, could use the system to make quick, cheap, and accurate assessments of diseases. Check out the video from UCLA after the break.

Most of the emerging cases of HIV are in India and Africa, where access to central labs is infrequent. Checking blood samples in even the most routine cases can take days. Likewise with Malaria, still one of the biggest killers and most feared infectious diseases in the world. Different versions of Ozcan’s mobile phone attachments could help diagnose patients with these diseases in just minutes, providing better opportunities for care. As this technology develops, private use could expand as well. Imagine being able to take a daily blood sample at home and test it daily for pathogens. You could know you were sick before you ever had symptoms. There are other dangerous microscopic particles besides pathogens. Mobile phone microscopy could help researchers find asbestos, lead, or other environmental poisons quickly. With this level of quick analysis, healthcare and longevity would improve dramatically.

Another team at UC Berkeley has developed a similar product called the cellscope. Ozcan’s device however, uses no lenses, and doesn’t take traditional images of cells. Magnification is done digitally, not optically.The system is called LUCAS or Lensless Ultra-wide-field Cell monitoring Array platform based on Shadow imaging. A mouthful to say, an impressive concept to see in action. Using relatively cheap light emitting diodes, LUCAS is able to form a sort of shadow holography, creating detailed images derived from the transparency of cells. That cell shadow contains a lot of information about the health of the cell.

Unlike traditional light microscopy, LUCAS uses shadows of cells to analyze them. These are stained white blood cells.

When LUCAS is used on a sample, healthy and infected cells are shown side by side. In this way, the analysis is more holistic than traditional light microscopy and could assist researchers in forming the database used to recognize illnesses. That database is very important because LUCAS does not produce traditional images. Untrained medical professionals, and even experienced lab technicians, would not necessarily be able to translate the LUCAS images into a diagnosis on their own.

The cell shadow database, and the LUCAS hardware is still under development. As shown in the UCLA video, there will likely be many different forms of the mobile phone attachments, not just to fit with the various phone models, but also to provide different kinds of imaging in the field. There are versions with USB connections for phones without cameras and at least one version with different color LEDs to help with specific disease recognition.

Ozcan’s system is promising, amazingly so. And while I’m excited about possibilities in global healthcare it may one day provide, I am uncertain how long it will take to realize his goals. The LUCAS database will have to be assembled very thoroughly and designed to handle an impressive amount of traffic in order to serve as a world wide diagnostic tool. Even if confined to more traditional forms of microscopy (like that used by Cellscope), mobile diagnosis would still require an extensive technical support system. Still, Ozcan has a few things going for him: his own dedicated brilliance, and the rise of highly sophisticated narrow artificial intelligence. We may one day see mobile diagnostic tools contacting not a doctor, but an AI that can analyze blood samples in microseconds. Oh the possibilities. We’ll let you know if any of it actually happens.

[photo credits: Ozcan via NY Times]
[video credit: UCLA]