Cellphone gadget to diagnose fatal diseases

BANGALORE, INDIA: One may consider a camera phone just as a luxury. But such phones could also be used as a cheap alternative for doing the diagnosis of certain diseases.

A U.S. team of researchers has designed a portable microscope that straps to a camera phone and can be used to diagnose potentially fatal diseases, especially in blood and sputum samples.

The team, which is stationed at the University of California in San Francisco and consisted of members such as David N. Breslauer, Robi N. Maamari, Neil A. Switz, Wilbur A. Lam and Daniel A. Fletcher, has already demonstrated the equipment's 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 fact, light microscopy is an essential healthcare tool that can help to diagnose dangerous diseases including malaria and tuberculosis. If necessary, digital images of cell samples provided by camera-equipped lab microscopes are passed via the Internet to experts at other healthcare centres for further analysis.

Though these technologies are often unavailable to those in remote regions or the developing world, the research, published in the free-access journal PLoS ONE, is optimistic about the device being more useful in the developing world, where mobile ownership and coverage are common while such medical diagnostics are rare.

“Given the ubiquity of mobile phone networks, the fact that many mobile phones are now equipped with digital cameras, the increase in computational power of mobile phones, and the advent of inexpensive high-power light emitting diodes (LEDs), we believe that these technologies can be combined to create an inexpensive and powerful tool for light (and especially fluorescence) microscopy in developing regions,” said the researchers.

"There are other people who have been working on developing portable fluorescent microscopes. The innovation on our front is that we've integrated fluorescent microscopes with a cell phone rather than just making a standalone microscope," said David Breslauer, a University of California Berkeley researcher and lead author of the study.

Moreover, in 2007, John Frean at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, showed that the cameras integrated into many cellphones can capture relatively good quality images of tissue samples simply by holding them against the eyepiece of a light microscope.