UCLA creates portable microscope that uses holograms, not lenses

Device described in Biomedical Optics Express may very well be used for field diagnostics in developing countries, testing of water quality, food contamination
August 30, 2011 12:41 PM Eastern Daylight Time

WASHINGTON–(EON: Enhanced Online News)–To serve remote areas of the area, doctors, nurses and field workers need equipment it’s portable, versatile, and comparatively inexpensive. Now researchers on the University of California at La (UCLA) have built a compact, light-weight, dual-mode microscope that uses holograms rather than lenses. The team describes the hot device in a paper published today within the Optical Society’s (OSA) open-access journal Biomedical Optics Express.

“we’re replacing a dear and hulking, heavy component with computer codes.”

Their prototype weighs about up to a medium-sized banana and fits within the palm of a hand. And, because it relies partially on mass-produced consumer electronics, all of the materials to make it add as much as between $50 and $100 USD.

It also has a two-in-one feature: a transmission mode that may be used to probe relatively large volumes of blood or water, and a mirrored image mode which can image denser, opaque samples. The spatial resolution for both modes is below two micrometers-reminiscent of that achieved by bulkier microscopes with low- to medium-power lenses.

“This is often the primary demonstration of essentially a hand-held version of a microscope which can do dual-mode imaging within a really compact and value-effective form,” says Aydogan Ozcan, an associate professor of electric engineering and bioengineering at UCLA and senior author of the paper.

With only a small amount of educating, doctors could use devices like these to enhance health care in remote areas of the realm with little access to diagnostic equipment, Ozcan says. The hand held microscope could help ensure water quality, test patients’ blood for harmful bacteria, or even be used for semen-quality monitoring on animal farms.

It is able to also prove useful in health crises similar to the new outbreak of E. coli in Europe.

“It is a very challenging task to detect E. coli in low concentrations in water and food,” Ozcan says. “This microscope is likely to be portion of an answer for field investigation of water, or food, or even pathogens in blood.”

Portion of the device’s success is the burden it shed when researchers bumped off the bulkier, heavier, costlier pieces that the majority microscopes have faith in for collecting and focusing light: the lenses. In preference to lenses, this microscope uses holograms.

Holograms are formed when light bouncing off (or passing through) a 3-dimensional object is made to interfere with a “reference beam,” or light that has not hit the item. Consider this analogy: drop a stone right into a still pond and the ripples will move outward in a circle. Drop two stones and the circular ripples will interfere with one another, creating a new pattern of crests and troughs. an individual (or computer) analyzing the interference pattern created by those two stones could trace the source back to the stones and recreate what had happened to make the waves.

The UCLA team’s device uses an analogous principle to recreate images from interfering light waves.

A reasonable light source is split into two beams -person who interacts with microscopic cells or particles inside the sample, and any other that doesn’t. The beams then pass to an adjacent sensor chip, where their interference pattern is recorded.

Software then analyzes that pattern and recreates the trail taken by the sunshine that gone through or bounced off of the objects being imaged.

Each section of the device in all fairness inexpensive, Ozcan says. The laser light could come from a $5 laser pointer. The sensor chip that collects that light is equal to those within the backs of iPhones and Blackberrys and prices under $15 per chip. And the entire image-collecting system runs on two AA batteries.

Where the researchers have reduced weight and expense in casting off lenses, they have got added the ability of the cloud. The microscope captures raw data; but a working laptop or computer is needed to reconstruct the photographs. Workers inside the field could use their laptops to process the knowledge or send it over the web or cell phone networks to a remote server. Cellphones can also have sufficient processing power to do the analysis instantaneous.

Essentially, Ozcan says, “we’re replacing a dear and ponderous, heavy component with computer codes.”

A higher steps for Ozcan’s team include commercializing the device. Ozcan says he has founded a corporation it really is developing this technology, seeking to make a version of the microscopes that may be manufactured and sold to healthcare workers and hobbyists.

“Global health is a huge field that requires better diagnostic tools, because resource-poor countries would not have the infrastructure for conducting essentially accurate diagnostic tests,” Ozcan says. “There are such a lot of problems that innovative solutions [like this microscope] would impact.”

Paper: “Field-portable reflection and transmission microscopy in accordance with lensless holography,” M. Lee, O. Yaglidere, A. Ozcan, Biomedical Optics Express, Volume 2, Issue 9, p. 2721-2730.