There are a lot of ways to trick out your smartphone. And if you're an eager Apple fan, the brand-new iPhone 4S will come with fancy apps that use its increasingly sophisticated camera to scan and image the world. A smartphone camera lens can measure objects, help translate words, and even tell you whether your potato chips have been caught in a food safety recall.
But Sebastian Wachsmann-Hogiu and colleagues at the Center for Biophotonics, Science and Technology at the University of California, Davis say a smartphone's camera lens can also serve as a microscope and a spectrometer, which both could be pretty handy for looking at blood samples.
The upper row of images shows blood samples through a traditional microscope. The bottom row shows the same samples imaged on a smartphone.
A few years ago, Wachsmann-Hogiu was thinking about creating tools to help doctors do tests right at the site where they're caring for patients, something called "point-of-care testing."
He'd heard about bioengineer Daniel Fletcher's work developing a low-tech mobile microscope called CellScope. But Wachsmann-Hogiu was interested in making something even simpler. And he noticed that when water droplets formed on the top of his iPhone camera, they magnified the image. So he took a tiny lens — just 1 millimeter in diameter — and attached it to the phone to try to get a similar effect.
"With that we were able to record great microscopic images," he tells Shots. His team set out to test a range of lenses between 1 and 3 millimeters that would get different magnification. The smaller the lens, the more it magnifies.
www.southerndope.com
0 comments:
Post a Comment