CellScope: U.C. Berkeley Engineers Invent Cell Phone Microscope

The CellScope project focuses on the development of a modular, high-magnification microscope attachment for cell phones. Due to its portability, affordability and functionality, the CellScope will enable health workers in remote areas to take high-resolution images of a patient’s blood cells using the mobile phone’s camera, and then transmit the photos to experts at medical centers. This device can reduce both the cost and time of performing critical disease diagnoses, as well as provide early warning of outbreaks in poverty-stricken regions in the world.

The Cellscope is designed to help the 247 million cases of malaria in 2006 and more than 9 million new cases of tuberculosis in 2007, with African countries bearing most of the burden in both cases. The Cellscope, with a simple attachment that clips onto the back of an ordinary camera phone and turns it into a portable and easy-to-use microscope capable of visualizing single-celled pathogens like malaria parasites or tuberculosis bacteria—no laboratory required.

CellScope users will be able to take diagnostic images of blood or sputum samples and then either send them off for further analysis using the phone’s wireless connectivity, or analyze them independently using image-analysis software that could be installed on the cell phone. In addition to being more portable, the CellScope may prove to be more valuable for diagnosis than basic compound microscopes. That’s because the device is capable of fluorescence microscopy, which produces images that are much easier for a layperson to decipher.

[via Newsweek & Blum Center]