The hardware added to this cell phone costs around $10.
(Credit: Ozcan Research Group/UCLA)To picture the next-gen microscope, don't picture a microscope at all. Aydogan Ozcan, an assistant professor of electrical engineering and member of the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA, is adapting cell phones to sample biological images.
This is no iPhone app. Ozcan, who formed the company Microskia (on the heels of the UC Berkeley team that developed CellScope), has built a prototype whose cell phone camera sensor can detect a slide's contents at a cellular level--reading, for example, an increase in white blood cell count that might indicate a new infection or injury. That information can then be forwarded wirelessly to a lab or hospital.
The brilliance of Ozcan's design is that magnification is done electronically, requiring no lens. (CellScope, on the other hand, takes a more conventional approach as a miniature microscope with expensive lenses.)
... Read more
(Credit:
David Breslauer, UC Berkeley)
UC Berkeley researchers announced in April a special lens that turns a normal cell phone camera into a portable microscope powerful enough to offer bright field microscopy. They called it CellScope.
Well, the device just got even more powerful. The group announced Tuesday that the CellScope is now capable of taking color images of malaria parasites and even of tuberculosis bacteria labeled with fluorescent markers.
The version of the Cellscope introduced in April works with handhelds and even Netbooks and can be used for bright field microscopy, which uses simple white light--such as from a bulb or sunlight--to illuminate samples. The new version adds fluorescent microscopy to the repertoire. The device can now take pictures of a target--such as a parasite, bacteria, or cell--tagged with a specific fluorescent wavelength emitted by a special dye.
To achieve this, the researchers used filters to block out background light and convert the light source--a simple LED--into the 460-nanometer wavelength required to excite the green fluorescent dye in the sample. After that they were were able to take fluorescent images of Mycobacterium tuberculosis (which causes TB in humans) with a 3.2-megapixel off-the-shelf phone camera. The images were then automatically analyzed using software to show the total of bacteria in the blood sample.
This new development means the prototype of the CellScope can also be used in field settings for disease screening and diagnoses. ... Read more
Researchers have come up with a microscopic microscope, tiny enough to fit on a fingertip, that can be cheaply mass-produced and used to scan blood and water for pathogens.
The high-resolution microscope functions without the large and expensive lenses usually associated with such imaging devices. Instead, it combines the chip technology found in digital cameras with "microfluidics," the science of channeling liquid at scales far smaller than a common droplet.
An optofluidic microscope chip, as compared with a U.S. dime.
(Credit: Caltech)"The whole thing is truly compact--it could be put in a cell phone--and it can use just sunlight for illumination, which makes it very appealing for third-world applications," said Changhuei Yang, an assistant professor of electrical engineering and bioengineering at the California Institute of Technology and one of the lead developers of the device.
Yang imagines a range of uses for the so-called optofluidic microscope, which measures about the size of George Washington's nose on a quarter and has the magnifying power of a top-quality optical microscope, according to the Caltech research team.
Health field workers could use it to examine blood samples for malaria and check water for giardia and other parasites. It could be employed on the battlefield. Yang said the microscope could one day even be implanted inside humans to isolate rogue cancer cells circulating in the bloodstream.
"Our research is motivated by the fact that microscopes have been around since the 16th century, and yet their basic design has undergone very little change and has proven prohibitively expensive to miniaturize," said Yang, who is currently in talks with biotech companies about mass-producing the chip, a process he says costs about $10 per microscope.
... Read more
(Credit:
Akihabara News)
It used to be that powerful microscopes were reserved for laboratories, but magnification levels that were once possible only with professional equipment are increasingly available to the masses thanks to advances in digital technologies. Some gadgets are finding a natural home on the science toy market for kids, complete with night-vision features.
But the most certain way to tell if a product category has attrained common-denominator status is when it reaches the prolific mass manufacturers of Asia. To wit: Korean company 3R Systems has unveiled the "ViTiny," a pocket-sized digital microscope.
Measuring 4.7 by 2.2 inches and just under an inch thick, it has a 1.8-inch LCD, 2MB of memory, and a magnification range of 24x to 90x, according to Akihabara News. Hardly the most powerful, but not the worst considering it's portable. Besides, there are some things in life that are better left unseen.
Dino-Light Digital USB Microscope AM413M
(Credit: CNET Networks)At this year's CES, adrift between meetings, I stumbled into a few digital microscope booths and spent a little time at the other end of the image-capture spectrum; in cameraville, we tend to concentrate on the telephoto megazooms, which make big things look small, as opposed to the telemacro end, making small things look big. Over the past couple of weeks, I had the opportunity to put the BigC Dino-Lite Digital Microscope AM413M under the, um, microscope.
... Read more
The combination of neon colors and its surprising use makes this camera a natural for a recurring role in CSI: Miami.
(Credit:
Aven)
Aven's iLoupe is a field microscope disguised as a fashion camera that can be used with three interchangeable lenses of 60x, 100x and 150x magnification. The camera itself is a 6-megapixel Canon SD600 with a lens adapter ring and a USB connection that can be used to blow up images on a larger screen. Aven says the iLoupe was made with crime scene investigations specifically in mind, though it can also be used for less glamorous tasks such as assembly-line car inspection.
Pricing is not yet known, but Mobile Magazine says it's available for purchase. And if you're in the market for something like this, it looks a lot nicer and easier to use than the traditional method.
We've never been able to use a microscope. There, we said it. For whatever reason, slides were always too blurry or we couldn't find what we were supposed to be looking for. When classmates called us over to look at stuff they found, we pretended to see it.
But this ThinkGeek item might help finally heal those adolescent scars: a plug-and-play USB digital microscope. The LED-lighted scope can magnify up to 300X and display images on your PC with software that's included. It also has a camera that can capture photos and do double duty as a webcam, complete with its own stand. And for $70, that's less than a standard therapy session to erase childhood memories.
(Photo: ThinkGeek)
- prev
- 1
- next
