Can technical innovations bring medical diagnostics anywhere a cell phone can go?
It is increasingly common for medical professionals to use images generated by light microscopy in the rapid evaluation and dissemination of a diagnosis of disease. This practice is so widespread that a medical communication standard has been adopted for using transferring digital images between doctors and institutions. This has resulted in improvements in rapid diagnosis of disease, but rural areas and developing nations lag far behind this due to the prohibitive cost of equipment and training required. Light microscopes and their more exotic cousins (dark-field, fluorescence microscopy, etc) are far from universal medical devices. Worse still for underserved regions, microscopy is an essential tool for diagnosis of diseases endemic to such areas. Tuberculosis, malaria and sickle-cell anemia are just a handful of the afflictions most easily characterized by microscopy, and which are also extremely common in developing nations.
What is strange and in this case fortunate is that rural areas and developing nations are being more quickly served by mobile phone providers, and thanks to this fact researchers in Berkeley, California were able to engineer a device that could interface with a standard cell phone to capture, analyze and transmit high-resolution microscopic images such that positive diagnoses could be made.
Using a Nokia phone equipped with only a 3.2-megapixel CMOS camera, scientists and engineers were able to construct a device consisting of two filters and three lenses that was capable of capturing high-quality microscopic images of blood (allowing positive diagnosis of malaria and sickle-cell anemia) and sputum (allowing positive diagnosis of tuberculosis). The latter required the addition of an LED emitting in the ultraviolet spectrum, permitting fluorescence microscopic images to be captured by the cell phone’s camera. While minimal image modification was required for the light microscopy images, even the fluorescence microscopy images needed only minor processing before they could be analyzed successfully.
The power and utility of this innovation of science and engineering cannot be easily overstated. For a relative pittance, the power of expensive and complex instruments requiring trained technicians to operate is now available to anyone with a cell phone. Soon, underserved rural areas and developing nations will have the possibility of rapid and high-accuracy diagnoses. With this piece of technical know-how the scientists, engineers and medical professionals of Berkeley have pushed back the darkness a little farther and paved the way for a better quality of life for many who suffer only because of where they happen to have been born.
For more information:
Mobile Phone Based Clinical Microscopy for Global Health Applications (Breslauer et al)
© AQOS / P. Smalley
Reproduction with attribution is appreciation
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