Gerard Coté, professor of biomedical engineering and director of the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station’s Center for Remote Health Technologies and Systems. Credit: Texas A&M University
It could significantly improve malaria diagnoses, Rx in developing countries that often lack the resources to address the life-threatening disease. The add-on device, which is similar in look and feel to a protective phone case, uses a smart phone’s camera features to produce high-resolution images of objects 10X smaller than the thickness of a human hair, says Prof Gerard Coté who developed the mobile-optical-polarization imaging device (MOPID).
MOPID is capable of accepting a small cartridge containing a patient’s blood-smear sample, which is then imaged using polarized light in order to detect the presence of hemozoin crystals (byproduct of the malaria parasite, and occur in the blood of an infected host). As polarized light bounces off of these crystals, they appear as tiny bright dots when observed through the phone’s camera lens >> instant, accurate diagnosis.
From: Malaria Diagnosis Using a Mobile Phone Polarized Microscope (A) Leica DMLM polarized white light microscope used as reference for comparison in this study; and (B) a microscope lens combination implemented into a 3D-printed fitting to allow similar function to a traditional polarized laboratory microscope. The MOPID system was configured in transmission mode with a magnification designed for 40X when using a mobile phone camera. An iPhone 5s was used with polarizer sheets added and a 3D-printed fitting to hold the light source, diffuser, sample slide, and microscope attachment.
“What we’ve achieved with MOPID is the design of a polarized microscope platform using a cell phone, which can detect birefringence in histological specimens infected with the malaria parasite,” Coté says. “It’s a simple, low-cost ($10/unit), portable device that we believe is more sensitive than the standard microscope that uses white light and just as accurate as the more costly and complex benchtop version of a polarized microscope.”
Images acquired of mouse malaria strain blood smear without polarized light using From: Malaria Diagnosis Using a Mobile Phone Polarized Microscope (A) a Leica microscope with a 40X magnification objective and (B) the same area of the slide imaged utilizing the iPhone 5s mobile phone based design. Above each of the respective images is a zoomed in image of the same region for each photo to better illustrate the comparable resolution of the two microscopes.
Note: Malaria caused 584,000 deaths in 2013, along with ~198 million new cases in that span of time. Many of these regions suffer from misdiagnoses due to inadequate or even nonexistent medical infrastructures. While failure to treat malaria can be fatal, the administering of unnecessary malaria medications as a result of misdiagnoses can results in new, drug-resistant strains of the disease in addition to increasing costs for malaria medications, Coté notes.
Plans for in vivo field-testing are scheduled to take place in Rwanda, Africa in the near future, Coté notes. http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/639332/
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