Diagnosis of malaria must be rapid, accurate, simple to use, portable and low cost, as suggested by the World Health Organization (WHO). Despite recent efforts, the gold standard remains the light microscopy of a stained blood film. This method can detect low parasitemia and identify different species of Plasmodium. However, it is time consuming, it requires well trained microscopist and good instrumentation to minimize misinterpretation, thus the costs are considerable. Moreover, the equipment cannot be easily transported and installed. In this paper we propose a new technique named “secondary speckle sensing microscopy” (S3M) based upon extraction of correlation based statistics of speckle patterns generated while illuminating red blood cells with a laser and inspecting them under a microscope. Then, using fuzzy logic ruling and principle component analysis, good quality of separation between healthy and infected red blood cells was demonstrated in preliminary experiments. The proposed technique can be used for automated high rate detection of malaria infected red blood cells.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

This paper presents a method for heating silicon wafers locally by open-end coaxial microwave applicators, with optical techniques employed for measuring the temperature. Silicon samples of ∼2 × 2 cm 2 area were radiated in air atmosphere by a microwave drill operating at 2.45 GHz in the range of 20-450 W. The rate of temperature variation was measured by the Fabry-Pérot etalon effect in samples illuminated by InGaAs lasers. The steady-state temperatures were measured by the changes in the absorption index of an InGaAs laser beam. The experimental results indicate heating rates of ∼150 K s −1 and a temperature range of 300-900 K across the silicon sample during the microwave heating process. Further operation of the microwave drill caused local melting of the silicon samples. This paper presents the experimental setup and results, as well as numerical simulations of the microwave heating process.