A new MacGyver-esque cellphone hack could bring cheap, on-the-spot disease detection to even the most remote villages on the planet, reports Wired. It could revolutionize disease detection in the field.
An off-the-shelf Sony Ericsson cellphone has been modded using only an LED, plastic light filter and some wires.
The bulge is the filtered light source that illuminates the sample. UCLA’s California NanoSystems Institute made the portable blood tester. It is 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. The Lensfree Ultrawide-field Cell-monitoring Array (LUCAS) platform is based on Shadow imaging. The filtered light exposes distinctive qualities of the cells, which are then interpreted by Ozcan’s custom software.
Blood tests today require either refrigerator-sized machines that cost tens of thousands of dollars or a trained technician who manually identifies and counts cells under a microscope. It may eliminate sending blood away to a lab and waiting days or weeks for results.
