Turning a cell phone into a microscope

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>> My name is David Breslar. I'm a graduate student at UC Berkeley and I work on portable medical diagnostic devices.

Music We've designed what we call the CellScope. We've taken a standard cell phone with a cell phone camera built in and we designed a microscope around that. The idea being that if you can use the cell phone camera as an imaging platform to image, take microscopic images of clinical samples, then you have a portable field microscopic for use into these diagnostics. In the CellScope we use fluorescents to look at samples. And fluorescent microscopy is a new technique that makes what you're looking at sort of look like stars in the night. Because of that contrast, because you can just count these stars, it's much easier to look at samples and diagnose diseases. The significance of the CellScope is that in many rural areas in developing world countries have very little health infrastructure, very little power infrastructure. But you've got cell phone coverage that pretty much blankets the globe. So if you can make a portable system that can be transported into these areas to do clinical diagnostics without the need for a doctor on-site, a whole clinic on-site, then you're really enabling health care in these areas. What we have here is an actual blood smear with malaria inserted in the end of the CellScope device. And focus on your sample and you can see the various cells. These are actually red blood cells from a person's blood sample, and we can capture this image and either save it for medical records or transmit it for analysis. Or do automated data analysis. A vision for the future of the CellScope is to make it a fully integrated system that isn't just a microscope and a cell phone together, but an actual entire mobile platform for medical imaging.

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