Mobile Phone Based Clinical Microscopy for Global Health Applications

Abstract

Light microscopy provides a simple, cost-effective, and vital method for the diagnosis and screening of hematologic and infectious diseases. In many regions of the world, however, the required equipment is either unavailable or insufficiently portable, and operators may not possess adequate training to make full use of the images obtained. Counterintuitively, these same regions are often well served by mobile phone networks, suggesting the possibility of leveraging portable, camera-enabled mobile phones for diagnostic imaging and telemedicine. Toward this end we have built a mobile phone-mounted light microscope and demonstrated its potential for clinical use by imaging P. falciparum-infected and sickle red blood cells in brightfield and M. tuberculosis-infected sputum samples in fluorescence with LED excitation. In all cases resolution exceeded that necessary to detect blood cell and microorganism morphology, and with the tuberculosis samples we took further advantage of the digitized images to demonstrate automated bacillus counting via image analysis software. We expect such a telemedicine system for global healthcare via mobile phone – offering inexpensive brightfield and fluorescence microscopy integrated with automated image analysis – to provide an important tool for disease diagnosis and screening, particularly in the developing world and rural areas where laboratory facilities are scarce but mobile phone infrastructure is extensive.

A one-piece 3D printed flexure translation stage for open-source microscopy

“…Furthermore, a good mechanical stage is one of the key distinguishing features of researchgrade microscopes compared to the many low cost microscopes currently available. 8 Thus, our design has the potential to enable a wide range of experiments that are impossible with current low-performance microscopes but are difficult due to the significant size and cost of current research microscopestime-lapse experiments requiring days or weeks of microscope time, use in constrained environments such as fume hoods or incubators, or applications in containment labs requiring disposable equipment. We have used the Raspberry Pi singleboard computer and camera module 9 as its small size and low power consumption make it suitable to run automated experiments on the microscope for days or weeks.…”

Medical mobile technologies – what is needed for a sustainable and scalable implementation on a global scale?

“…A large number of mobile health solutions have been presented within this field, including applications for emergency medicine, surgery, otolaryngology, ophthalmology, dermatology, radiology, pathology and general medicine [4]. Specific applications such as burn injury consultation [5], oral cancer diagnostics [6], diagnosis of middle-ear infections [7], refraction tests and cataract assessment (Eyenetra, Somerville, MA), skin cancer detection (SkinVision, SkinVision BV, Amsterdam, Netherlands and MoleScope, MetaOptima, Vancouver, BC) and parasite and cancer microscopy-based diagnosis [8–10] to name a few. A series of portable ultrasound systems are available that can display the image on portable devices, providing rugged low-cost systems that do not compromise the image quality (VScan, GE Healthcare, Chicago, IL, and Clarius, Burnaby BC, Canada).…”

Towards autonomous lab-on-a-chip devices for cell phone biosensing

“…In contrast with this instrumentation approach, other solutions aim at partially or totally retaining cell phone ubiquity by excluding electronic interfacing and employing either reusable accessories (Breslauer et al, 2009;Smith et al, 2011;Zhu et al, 2013;Vashist et al, 2014;Mudanyali et al, 2012;Switz et al, 2014;Potyrailo, 2013; http://holomic.com) or disposable devices (Matinez et al, 2008a;Preechaburana et al, 2012aPreechaburana et al, , 2014Preechaburana et al, , 2015Comina et al, 2015a) to complement cell phones for biosensing and chemical detection. These techniques dominantly exploit optical coupling to cell phone cameras, which represents a universally available resource across phone models, brands and operating systems.…”