Slashdot Mirror
Scientists Hack Cellphone To Detect Diseases
Dave Bullock (eecue) plugs his piece up at Wired on a cellphone modded into a portable blood tester. This could become a significant piece of medical technology. "A new MacGyver-esque cellphone hack could bring cheap, on-the-spot disease detection to even the most remote villages on the planet. Using only an LED, plastic light filter, and some wires, scientists at UCLA have modded a cellphone into a portable blood tester capable of detecting HIV, malaria, and other illnesses. Blood tests today require either refrigerator-sized machines that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars or a trained technician who manually identifies and counts cells under a microscope. These systems are slow, expensive and require dedicated labs to function. And soon they could be a thing of the past."
It may work, but its completely useless from a diagnostics standpoint. Knowing the size of a cell is useless, especially with the resolution and sensitivity a cell phone camera could provide. Past publications from this lab show no reliable size discrimination below 15 microns, so even if it were useful information, it would be useless for human cell samples of which nearly all interesting species are smaller than or border this threshold. Sub-cellular resolution might help you do something like malaria diagnostics, but the amount of sample that needs to be analyzed and the magnification level you would need to be able to discriminate the plasmodium within a red blood cell are so high that, surprise, you're so much better off using a $100 microscope.