Cell Phones Turn into Portable Medical Labs

Can you imagine a doctor diagnosing you for malaria or HIV with your cell phone? Well, a new invention could make that possible. Media shows that CellScope, a special microscope that attaches to cellular phones, could turn your cell phone into a portable medical lab that fits in your pocket. It's amazing what cell phones are capable of today. You can watch TV, surf the internet, listen to music, capture and send instant video clips, and soon receive professional medical treatment right from your mobile phone anywhere in the world.

Various media sources, including CNN, ABC News, Science Daily, ECN magazine, and various blog sites have reported cell phones becoming convenient medical resources.

According to Richard Hart, a writer for ABC News, students from the University of California at Berkeley have designed a hand-held microscopic imaging and transmission device that has the ability to capture magnified images of blood cells that are clear enough to indicate malaria (Hart). The device can convert a standard cellular phone camera into a clinical-quality microscope with 5-50X magnification abilities (Rattner). The original prototype of the cell-phone microscope utilized a Nokia cell phone with an embedded 3.1 megapixel camera (Anderson). It was made to clamp onto the back of a mobile phone handset, and was built from off-the-shelf components that cost less than $75 (Poor). A newer device is smaller and has its own illumination system made up of a ring of low-cost, low-power, and high-brightness white LED lights (Blum Center for Developing Countries).

The way this CellScope works is that it takes images of samples of blood cells that are placed on the camera sensor and lit up with a filtered light source. The filtered light exposes distinctive qualities of the cells, which are then interpreted by UCLA researcher Dr. Aydogan Ozcan's custom software. Before, the analyzing software could only run on computers. This meant that a person would have to send the images from his phone to a computer (Connelly). Recently, Ozcan and his UCLA team developed a software that can run directly on cell phones themselves. Their new device, called LUCAS, which stands for Lensless Ultra-wide-field Cell monitoring Array platform based on Shadow imaging, captures images to a phone chip that can then be analyzed by an algorithm program that is downloaded into the cell phone. "The image also can be transmitted wirelessly to a computer, which analyzes it and sends back a text message with the results" (Almasy).

According to UCLA's Blum Center for Developing Countries, the goal of these CellScope and LUCAS projects are "to bring modern diagnostic testing to remote regions cheaply and efficiently with telemicroscopy."

The clinical quality microscopes will especially come in handy for patients living in developing, rural countries, where medical equipment is scarce and there is a lack of qualified medical personnel (Rattner).

There are a lot different websites and media sources talking about this medical invention for cell phones. However, I believe that some of the more amateur writers did a better job at covering this issue than professionals like CNN and well-known newspapers. A lot of good information about the CellScope project came from students, bloggers, magazines, and other websites. CNN did a good job at providing quotes from Ozcan, but there wasn't a lot of information about the students and the CellScope project that started it all. It would have also been better if CNN included quotes from the UCLA students, patients in rural areas, and doctors who have actually used the device.

I thought that the magazines, ECN, The Future of Things, and Laser Focus World did a way better job at describing what the telemicroscopy projects were and their importance. I was impressed by the way the magazines included information about the different prototypes of the microscope and the kinds of technologies that were used. I was also impressed by the photographs that they provided with their articles. ECN Magazine took an interesting approach to the topic by making several analogies to teach people lessons.

"Give a kid a hammer, and the whole world looks like a nail," wrote Alfred Poor, the editor of ECN. His point was that you can repurpose something designed for one task, such as hammering, and use it for another. The lesson learned from this is that you don't need to start from scratch on every project, as demonstrated by CellScope's use of an cell phone and $50 attachments (Poor).

Bloggers did a surprisingly great job at explaining CellScope in an objective way. They also incorporated vivid photographs too.

Global Evision, a website dedicated to increasing awareness of the spread of more open markets and the global fight against poverty, actually quoted information about Ozcan and his team from one of the Wired.com bloggers.

I was glad that all of these media sources stated that the new invention would help people in rural, under-served areas. However, I think they all should have encouraged telemicroscopy in everyone's homes as well. A lot of people hate making appointments to see the doctor, and this new invention allows people to stay home and receive diagnosis from their doctors electronically. Only two websites aknowledged CellScope's ability to diagnose a person's mole growth at home.

ABC's coverage of the topic was pretty good. I provided a video clip from ABC7 News that you can watch.

Overall, I believe that there should have been a little more professional news coverage of this new invention because telemicroscopy will affect all cell phone owners and change the today's model of health care.

I can't wait to try CellScope or LUCAS for myself!

References:

(2006, March 1). Medical Records on Your Cell Phone: Computer Scientists Turn Cell Phones into Health Care Resource. Retrieved February 11, 2009, from ScienceDaily.com Web site: http://www.sciencedaily.com/videos/2006/0306-medical_records_on_your_cell_phone.htm

(2008, May 19). Microscope Enables Disease Diagnosis with a Cell Phone. Retrieved February 11, 2009, from Wired Blog Network Web site: http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/medicine/index.html

(2009). Telemicroscopy for Disease Diagnosis. Retrieved February 11, 2009, from Blum Center for Developing Economies Web site: http://blumcenter.berkeley.edu/telemicroscopy-disease-diagnosis

Almasy, Steve (2009, February 3). Invention turns cell phone into mobile medical lab. Retrieved February 11, 2009, from CNN.com/technology Web site: http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/02/03/medical.imaging.device/index.html

Anderson, Stephen (2008, April 3). Cell-phone microscope takes diagnostics into underserved communities. Laser Focus World, 98.

Connelly, Erin (2009, January 5). A Medical Lab in the Palm of Your Hand. Retrieved February 11, 2009, from Global Envision Web site: http://www.globalenvision.org/2009/01/04/medical-lab-palm-your-hand

Hart, Richard (2008, March 17). Cell camera turned medical microscope. Retrieved February 12, 2009, from ABC7 News Web site: http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=news/drive_to_discover&id=6023996

Poor, Alfred (2008, November 3). The CellScope. ECN Magazine, 24.

Rattner, Ethud (2008, April 11). The Birth of the Cell Phone Microscope. The Future of Things Magazine, Retrieved February 10, 2009, from http://thefutureofthings.com/news/1155/the-birth-of-the-cell-phone-microscope.html