Portable Microscope Uses Holograms Instead of Lens

Zothecula writes "While financial contributions are certainly a great help to health care practitioners in developing nations, one of the things that they really need is rugged, portable, low-cost medical equipment that is compatible with an often-limited local infrastructure. Several such devices are currently under development, such as a battery-powered surgical lamp, a salad-spinner-based centrifuge, and a baby-warmer that utilizes wax. UCLA is now working on another appropriate technology in the form of a small, inexpensive microscope that uses holograms instead of lenses to image what can't be seen by the human eye."

Comments

Infrastructure

[Fnord666]

Although the microscope itself collects raw data, an external laptop, smartphone, or cloud-based system performs all the processing.

The spatial resolution ... is reportedly similar to that offered by low- to medium-power lenses.

At this point don't you have more in infrastructure needs than you would with a basic optical microscope?

Re:Infrastructure

[ColdWetDog]

At this point don't you have more in infrastructure needs than you would with a basic optical microscope?

No, they'll hook it up to a smartphone. They're everywhere.

Really, I just don't see the point to this. Used optical microscopes are dirt cheap, certainly less than $50, are easy to maintain, don't require computers, don't have lasers and probably a number of things I'm not thinking of. The big cost in a rural facility isn't going to be basic infrastructure, it's going to be expendables - medications, bandages, sterile supplies.

Color me confused and a bit cynical about 'saving the world' through high tech stuff.

Re:Infrastructure

[johnstrass1]

I am a physician and I work in africa sometimes. The real treat here is potentially using optics (confocal or OCT) to produce better contrast in a small package. Processing tissue for light microscopy requires a big lab; this device uses reflectance data, not transmission, making it ideal for a hunk of flesh

Re:Infrastructure

[gumbi west]

Can you please explain why? Is it that the microscopes we know and love from HS biology are not capable of operating on reflected light?

Re:Infrastructure

[Gerzel]

Generally no. Think back to HS biology, you put stuff on clear glass slides to see it. If it operated on reflective you wouldn't need the slide, just put it under the black or white base and look.

Re:Infrastructure

[Anonymous Coward]

rugged, portable, low-cost medical equipment that is compatible with an often-limited local infrastructure

Wow, somebody is slightly delusional. The optical microscope wins on all accounts.

Re:Infrastructure

[introcept]

Although the microscope itself collects raw data, an external laptop, smartphone, or cloud-based system performs all the processing.

The spatial resolution ... is reportedly similar to that offered by low- to medium-power lenses.

At this point don't you have more in infrastructure needs than you would with a basic optical microscope?

No, you're ignoring the most important 'infrastructure need' of having an actual physician view and interpret the images. This system allows people with no medical training to collect image data and transmit it to a remote physician for diagnosis.For people in areas that are too poor/remote/sparsely populated, this may be the only possible way they can access medical diagnostic facilities.
On top of that, with the ever decling cost of electronic components like diode lasers and ccds, this thing has the potential to be cheaper and smaller than optical equipment.

Re:Infrastructure

[Anonymous Coward]

Wouldn't they just be African Africans?

Re:Infrastructure

[Graymalkin]

The problem with a second hand optical telescope in this situation is in order to use it effectively you need infrastructure to process your samples. Even if those facilities exist somewhere in-country they may not be local. If a sample needs to be preserved, transported, prepared, imaged, and then finally examined by a doctor it may not do any good since the process has taken days or weeks.

A microscope that doesn't need to have samples prepared and can potentially image something in situ is a big win. It's even better if this can be plugged into a cell phone so data can be send directly to a doctor. There's millions or remote villages in Africa and Asia that lack running water but have basic cellular phone service. A traveling doctor or aid worker could be in a remote village, immediately image something with a microscope, and have a specialist look at it in hours if not minutes.

The goal of many of these types of projects is to build medical technologies that are practical for the environments in which they'll operate. A delicate surgical light might be fine for a suburban hospital but is completely inappropriate for a field hospital in a refugee camp. A microscope that needs prepared samples isn't appropriate for a traveling doctor days away from the nearest hospital.

Re:Infrastructure

[Doubting Sapien]

Is this really that big of an advantage in the field? I am not a physician, but most of the life science work I've done on patient samples involving a microscope uses very established methods and procedures that pretty much take for granted you're using a transmission microscope. Things like serological analysis, for example. You may ultimately have the better point. However, one would at least venture a reasonable guess that to fully utilize an equipment of this nature, a significant amount of retraining may be in order.

Re:Infrastructure

[Joce640k]

Really, I just don't see the point to this. Used optical microscopes are dirt cheap, certainly less than $50, are easy to maintain, don't require computers, don't have lasers and probably a number of things I'm not thinking of.

The strange thing about digital information is that you can transmit it to other places for other people to look at. Can't do that with an optical microscope, used or otherwise.

I bet these are easier to use, too. Optical microscopes are very fiddly (I don't mean looking down the tube, I mean setting them up, getting the best lighting, etc).

Re:Infrastructure

[Joce640k]

Apparently not, or we wouldn't be reading this.

I'm guessing that being able to do stuff like enhance contrast digitally, send images to other people, etc. is A Good Thing.

Re:Infrastructure

[tgd]

I am a physician and I work in africa sometimes. The real treat here is potentially using optics (confocal or OCT) to produce better contrast in a small package. Processing tissue for light microscopy requires a big lab; this device uses reflectance data, not transmission, making it ideal for a hunk of flesh

WTF, this website is not about people with actual experience in the subject matter.

Re:Infrastructure

[john83]

I'm an academic working in optics. This is holographic, not OCT. The difference is small - mainly the coherence length of the laser, but essentially the holographic microscope has slightly better resolution at the cost of much worse rejection of out of focus light. So this device is probably better for examining a biopsy or some water for contamination or something rather than looking at a hunk of tissue, which is where OCT shines. The holographic approach is better in one other way - it grabs an image in one shot, where as most other 3D techniques require scanning. That could be an advantage in in-vivo imaging of cells.

Re:Infrastructure

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently not, or we wouldn't be reading this

The low response count suggests otherwise. Not to mention the prevailing sentiments of those responses.

being able to do stuff like enhance contrast digitally, send images to other people, etc. is A Good Thing.

Which part of "often-limited local infrastructure" do you not understand.

I'm not saying this tech has no merits, but I wouldn't use a flashlight as hammer when a hammer is available.

Re:Infrastructure

[marcosdumay]

"Limited infrastructure" nowadays means that you have plenty of computing power available and good enough bandwidth, bot no sterilized room, no reactancts storage and maybe no stable area to work.

Two decades ago, it had just the inverse meaning.

Re:Infrastructure

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes I understand the basic idea here. I desperately need a field device for imaging a small piece of tissue without processing the specimen. At the moment spectral imaging seems the best. I need to learn more about holography in microscopy.

Cheap microscopes aren't the problem...

[demonlapin]

That's a cool bit of tech, but I'd rather have a microscope that works off ambient light and doesn't need a smartphone/laptop/whatever to process the data. And the real thing isn't that much more expensive, at least on the used market.

Re:Cheap microscopes aren't the problem...

[Anonymous Coward]

but then you have to figure out how to prep the specimens. You've clearly never fucking been to Africa. If you're lucky, the pot you use to boil the knife to sterilize it for the biopsy .... is clean. Having the equipment to slice your sample thinly to look at it under a microscope? Get real. Maintaining it, where the concept of mail is not in the local language? Yeah, so, anyway.

Re:Cheap microscopes aren't the problem...

[Anonymous Coward]

I would imaging that having it on a smart electronic device would also enable it to be transmitted to a remote specialist for their input.

Re:Cheap microscopes aren't the problem...

[demonlapin]

Why would I need to go to Africa to know their limitations? You wouldn't slice and dice tissue there, anyway, because the people can't afford chemotherapy in the bush (which is the only place you're going to use this stuff). You'll be doing fluid and culture smears to identify bacteria, malaria, STDs, etc.

Re:Do Not Want

[mug funky]

translation:

I want to piss all over the world, but don't want anyone else to.

thanks, cunt.

"utilizes" makes me cry

[gumbi west]

"utilizes" = "uses" every singe time. Saves you 4 letters and from sounding like the kind of person who would you a longer word for no reason (aka, a manager who has lost confidence from not knowing how to do anything anymore).

Re:"utilizes" makes me cry

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, let's strip down the language to the bare minimum and remove all synonyms.

Re:"utilizes" makes me cry

[Anonymous Coward]

From this place

So if you’re in marketing or PR, you can just use “use”; it’s probably not a good idea to utilize “utilize.” In a similar vein, please avoid the word “utilization.” It does your sentence no good.

Surprisingly, “utilize,” a 19th-century loanword from French (8), does have very specific and valid uses, mostly in the scientific world. The word “utilize” often appears “in contexts in which a strategy is put to practical advantage...

from sounding like the kind of person who would you a longer word for no reason

Well, anyway, please understand that different words can be synonymous in some cases and have specific differentiation in others.

Signed,

Da Boss.

Re:"utilizes" makes me cry

[AK Marc]

I wish someone would. Strip it down. Get rid of the surpurfulous words. Fix synonyms, homonyms, and such. Eliminate silent letters. Change spellings until letter pronunciation is more uniform. Fix our broken language. It's broken. Where's my Esperanto?

Re:"utilizes" makes me cry

[marcosdumay]

Men, you should learn French... Or Portugueese.

Your Esperanto is too logical, it does not lead to good non-explicity messages. What good is a language you can not make good jokes on? Could very well adopt Orwell's new-speack

Re:"utilizes" makes me cry

[mark-t]

Not exactly correct.

"Utilize" explicitly refers to atypical, or possibly innovative usage, where the verb "use" does not.

Conventionally, holograms simply refer to 3d images, and generally speaking, can't be used for anything except to be looked at. That their properties can be exploited to bend light in the same way that a lens does is wholly atypical for that domain, and therefore "utilize" is a more precise term than "use".

Re:"utilizes" makes me cry

[AK Marc]

I suggest getting rid of silent letters and you suggest French? Seriously? See, no puns or rhymes necessary for a joke...

Re:"utilizes" makes me cry

[marcosdumay]

Yeah, I tought that would make you stop complinning about English.

It seems you already know it, and my guess was wrong.

Re:"utilizes" makes me cry

[AK Marc]

French at least has rules about what's silent when (mostly everything after the last vowel, though I don't know French at all). English has "rules" that are guidelines we are lucky if they are right half the time. French, being a proscriptive language is better for these things than English, a language formed from so many others that often times words will enter from one language then morph to match one from another, leading to broken prefixes and suffixes.

Re:"utilizes" makes me cry

[gumbi west]

Keep telling yourself that.

Re:"utilizes" makes me cry

[gumbi west]

Italian did exactly this. I only visited the country for a few weeks, but I was a better Italian speller than English speller when I left. If you hear a word, you can write it, if you can write a word, you can speak it. It's wonderful.

Re:"utilizes" makes me cry

[gumbi west]

I don't buy it. In every instance she cites, "use" or "used" sounds better, communicates the exact same thing, and makes the writer sound less puffed up.

Salad Spinner....what about a Dremel Fuge?

[Anonymous Coward]

Here is an electric powered centrifuge. A battery powered dremel should work ....http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1483

Re:Salad Spinner....what about a Dremel Fuge?

[Yamioni]

Guess you've never heard of manual salad spinners, huh? You either depress a spring loaded plunger or turn a crank to spin the water off of the lettuce. No electricity required, just a couple calories.

Re:deuce!

[Anonymous Coward]

Commodore64_love! You've returned!

why research?

[Osgeld]

everything you described in the summary has already been done. fucking look it up and save a ton in researching the no shit

really? a battery operated surgical lamp, how would that ever be done (high amp battery meet bulb) and no shit when you spin things it acts as a centrifuge. Wax wow it can be melted to a liquid and retains heat for a while never fucking noticed that before

tell me when we invent researchers who are not too lazy to go dumpster diving in a library once in a while please.

Re:why research?

[unkiereamus]

There is a huge difference between a basic concept and a working piece of equipment, especially when you start talking about medical things. I think your major problem is that you're confusing research science with engineering, and dismissing how hard engineering can be. Any how, let's run down the list, shall we?

1. Battery powered surgical lights: Surgical lights aren't just a light bulb in a stand, by necessity, stupefyingly bright, moreover, they're focusable, and here's something you probably have never thought about, and the article doesn't mention, but the ones you find in hospitals are ridiculously delicate, I've run into one with my head as I walked across a room and broke it. Finally, you CAN NOT have to stop to change the battery half-way through a surgery, so you've got to have automatic fail over to another battery, and probably a third reserve battery, just in case.
Verdict: The battery and bulb are research science, and the rest is pretty much engineering.

2. Salad Spinner centrifuge: You do realize that when you are doing almost every medical lab test requiring a centrifuge, you've got to spin it for a speficied amount of time with a specified amount of force, spin it too long or too hard (for some tests, even a surge of over speed will ruin the exam.) Go get your salad shooter, try to spin it at an exact RPM for an exact amount of time. Now do it a hundred more times. Easy was it?
Verdict: Almost all engineering, though probably with some material science.

3. Wax based incubators: Again, incubators HAVE to be within a very narrow band of temperature, too hot, the baby dies, too cold, the baby dies. So, think you can whip one of these up in your toolshed, eh? What kind of wax are you going to use? How much of it? Are you going to have radiators for the transfer of heat to the incubator? How hot are you going to heat the wax...for that matter, how are you going to heat the wax? Does the wax need to be circulated, if so, how will you do it?
Verdict: Huge engineering headaches, plus some science on determining which wax to be used.

Re:why research?

[Osgeld]

1) not fucking really we functioned with sunlight and mirrors, I see no mention of the exact specifications you bring, and with high powered LED arrays its not a magic trick to power blinding bright light via battery, and noone ever defined battery, you think a 400 amp car battery can fire up a led matrix?

2) Its not that hard we live in 2011 we figured out digital RPM control 2 generations ago, a child with an arduino and a proper motor could do it

3) probably with the same computers that control the temperature of more fragile things than a baby for the last few decades...

do you have any clue of what control we have over things as simplistic as current, RPM and heat? Its not magic to apply control over analog devices, we have been doing it since before computers and electronics with a high degree of success.

Re:why research?

[unkiereamus]

So, let me go ahead and guess that you live in a first world country somewhere.

You probably lose power what...Once a year? Maybe twice? Every building in a city has running water, right? Oh, and that water is safe, don't have to boil it before you can drink it, let alone use it in a medical situation.

Guess what, there's a big old world out there, most of it can't say that.

I live in a really highly developed area of a third world country. Our power is quite reliable, it's usually not out for more than about 4 hours a week (Nowadays, the service has improved radically over the course of the last about 4 years.). Maybe about 10% of the buildings around here have running water, and about 5% of those have water that's actually safe to drink (Fortunately for me, that includes my water, it tastes nasty, but I'm not going to get sick from it.) Oh, by the way, the hospital here isn't amoung those with running water, nor a backup power system.

As noted though, this place is well above average. There are places in the world where electric service and running water (not of the creek variety) are unheard of... not unusual, not really rare, they've never heard of it.

So, how exactly is your Arduino and motor or your computer temperature control system going to fair without electricity? Well, I suppose we could shove a battery in it...oh wait, but how are we going to charge that battery?


Oh, and PS: the wax incubator came about because scientists discovered (Note that fancy word "discovered", it doesn't mean found it in a book.) a wax which has its liquid-solid phase change at 98F, which means that it will hold that temperature for a long time as it goes through the phase change.

Re:why research?

[Anonymous Coward]

who cares about your shithole, get off your ass and do some work

Re:Do Not Want

[Anonymous Coward]

Kenya is doing quite well. Why? One reason is because Baraq Obama isn't their president. But the main reason is China. Yep, the communists didn't give them a handout, they went in, cash in hand, and bought mineral rights, etc, and the Kenyans used the money to buy construction equipment (from China), etc, to upgrade their country.

(Kenya is also a capitalist democratic republic, which many other African countries are not. Without property rights and an equal rule of law, your country will be a hellhole).

DING DING! Cheap microscopes aren't the problem...

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.alibaba.com/trade/search?SearchText=optical+microscope&Country=&IndexArea=product_en&fsb=y

Cheap optical microscope, $28-$29

http://www.alibaba.com/product-gs/407358404/XSP_51_Biological_microscope_optical_microscope.html

A USB reflective optical microscope, $10

http://www.alibaba.com/product-gs/464883671/USB_130x200_usb_optical_microscope.html

Seriously, if this is not cheap, I don't know what is. The expensive part is the *physician* that can actually use this stuff properly. With USB microscope, that can even be done remotely provided you have some cheap laptop with it. But then you'll need that for their "hologram microscope" too!!

Sure, do research on new imaging techniques, but stop, for the love of God, trying to tell us this is "cheap for Africa research". Come on!!

Anoptikon

[Arancaytar]

Asimov called it!

Any photos of a magnified sample ?

[advid.net]

In TFA I haven't seen any actual picture (photo of magnified sample) made by this microscope.

Did I missed something ?

/. crowd usually says "picts or it didn't happen!"

Re:Any photos of a magnified sample ?

[unkiereamus]

Sorry, you're confusing your online troll communities, that would be /b/ that says "Pics or it didn't happen.".

Don't worry, it's a common rookie mistake

Re:Any photos of a magnified sample ?

[Anonymous Coward]

No offence, but how about looking at TFA? No need to read it, mind you. There's an image gallery with three pics, two of the device and one "action-shot":
http://www.gizmag.com/cheap-microscope-uses-holograms/19679/picture/141169/

Re:Any photos of a magnified sample ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, You missed the pictures. it's in the full text PDF.

Re:Any photos of a magnified sample ?

[Anonymous Coward]

You didn't look hard enough. It is in the image gallery. Direct link http://www.gizmag.com/cheap-microscope-uses-holograms/19679/picture/141171/

A simpler laser point source microscope

[An dochasac]

Cool technology, but there is a simpler solution which doesn't require lenses, holograms, laser beam splitters, computers or CCDs. A transmission laser microscope. The example on the teravolt web page shows the sample in a water drop which acts as both the sample holder and lens. It is also possible to remove the converging lens from the laser diode so that it becomes a simple point source microscope (think pinhole camera, in reverse). The light source in a typical laser is comparable to the size of a bacteria so, while it isn't truely a point source, for 50-100x microscopy (paramecium, amoeba, blood cells, brine shrimp...) it works well. Something like this might be particularly useful in testing water and body fluid samples for parasites.

saving the world through high tech stuff

[tinkerton]

..that's a general tendency, it goes far beyond slashdot. There's more than one thing wrong with it. It reminds me of this -valuable- article claiming that our longterm energy needs will necessarily have to be met by relatively lowtech, non-exotic solutions: mirrors and heatengines:

http://www.phoenixprojectfoundation.us/uploads/IEEE_Solar_Hydrogen_Paper.pdf

Re:saving the world through high tech stuff

[marcosdumay]

We have approximately 200,000 years of experience on using hight tech to "save the world". It seems to work quite well on most tasks.

Of course once in a while it fails.

Re:saving the world through high tech stuff

[tinkerton]

That's the kind of opinion I'm talking about yes. This is not about the value of technology, but about a distorted sense of value where cutting edge technology becomes a value in itself, where hightech trumps other solutions while the other solutions are more sensible.

1st world too!

[Anonymous Coward]

The 1st world could also use less expensive medical care.

Re:deuce!

[RockDoctor]

Dear AC,

Please spell and grammar check your dial-a-wank scripts before posting them. "Reign in my orgasm" indeed!

I suppose it's moderately appropriate that I'm listening to "The Miller's Tale" as I waste my time on this crap.