"A new MacGyver-esque cellphone hack could bring cheap, on-the-spot disease detection to even the most remote villages on the planet. Using only an LED, plastic light filter and some wires, scientists at UCLA's California NanoSystems Institute have modded a cellphone into a portable blood tester capable of monitoring HIV, malaria, leukemia and detecting diseases.
UCLA researcher Dr. Aydogan Ozcan images thousands of blood cells instantly by placing them on an off-the-shelf camera sensor and lighting them with a filtered-light source (coherent light, for you science buffs). The filtered light exposes distinctive qualities of the cells, which are then interpreted by Ozcan's custom software. By analyzing the cell types present in a much larger sample, a more accurate diagnosis can be made in a matter of minutes. No more sending blood away to a lab and waiting days or weeks for the results.
This off-the-shelf Sony Ericsson cellphone has been modded into a LUCAS imager. LUCAS is a selective acronym for Lensfree Ultrawide-field Cell-monitoring Array platform based on Shadow imaging.
The bulge on the back is the filtered light source that illuminates the sample. This low-cost hack could revolutionize disease detection in the field.
Ozcan is currently seeking a manufacturer for his devices. Once mass-produced, portable LUCAS imagers could change health care around the world, especially in parts of the planet that don’t have access to medical laboratories."
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/multimedia/2008/12/gallery_microscope_phone
Comment by Gene_Machine:
"I worked at Los Alamos on HIV and Human genome. I also worked in Peace Corps in rural areas with HIV and child health. This blood analysis tool should be connected to a MYCIN expert system. My thesis used MYCIN like AI to reassemble genomes. MYCIN blood analysis allows doctors to diagnose disease cooperatively. MYCIN was the combination of thousands of doctor's diagnosis. Eventually a second step would be to use microarrays to analyze the DNA and proteins in the sample. How would microarrays be analyzed via cellphone? A cute SciFi book "Galapagos" by Kurt Vonnegut describes an AI like this. A Dwave Quantum supercomputer could use Grover's Algorithm to analyze all past blood samples to make a match. The phone based health care system could then be used world wide to diagnose disease. Costs for health care would drop quickly as diagnosis became cheap. How do we preserve privacy? The real cost in US health care involves HIPPA. A world standard for health care privacy/encryption is needed for this network to succeed." - hbrown@sisna.com
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