The next app for physician's iPhones...

Science News - Far From a Lab? Turn a Cell-Phone Into a Microscope
Recent developments in bioengineering imaging techniques have reached new heights with the finalization of "Microskia", the first company to sell cell-phones turned microscopes.

Microscopes are essential tools for the diagnosis of diseases through the visualization of blood and other cells. however, they present numerous disadvantages such as size and cost. These problems are especially grave for doctors trying to treat diseases in situations with limited resources. However, with about 10$ worth of off-the-shelf components, Aydogan Ozcan, an assistant professor of electrical engineering and member of the California NanoSystems Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, has converted everyday mobile phones into microscopes.

One of the prototypes uses a phone's camera sensor to detect a slide's content and send the information it collects (the asymmetric shape of diseased blood cells or other abnormal cells, an increase of white blood cells, a sign of infectio, etc.) to a health center wirelessly.

The reason why this invention is so small is that there are no longer any lenses - the largest and central element in microscopes - thanks to the possiblity of using electronic magnification. To do this, LEDs added to the phone shine their light on a sample, which hits the cells and scatters them off while interfering with other light waves. "“When the waves interfere, they create a pattern called a hologram.” The detector in the camera records that hologram or interference pattern as a series of pixels". This could potentially for a quick way to process samples, since it would no longer be necessary to scan them mechanically. “Instead you capture holograms of all the cells on the slide digitally at the same time, so that it’s possible, for example, to see immediately the pathogens among a vast population of healthy cells".

I think this is a really interesting article and (although I had previously blogged about this device), I'm really excited to see what the development of this technology is going to be, and how it will affect the field of imaging in bioengineering. The entire article can be found here.

BE research paper

Now I know how MRI works!
Today, I finished my bioengineering paper (yay!), and handed it in at recitation. I was really nervous about writing it, especially since it was my first college essay, the first time I did research in the field and the first time I wrote a real paper in English. I was happy with the final results, except for the eventful delivery of the assignment (when I slipped and half the pages flew away, so I had to run and reprint it, haha) and now I feel like I understand how hard it really is to write a good essay.


First of all, it was very hard for me to find reliable sources, since - for the level of complication the paper required - there were few good, official websites and books that were clear and understandable. However, there were plenty of information sources for more complex and less deep understanding, so it was a challenge to find a midpoint between both. I relied mostly on online resources, because most of the books I found were too complex for me to actually understand them without an extensive training in the imaging field or very outdated.


When I actually started writing the paper, by first writing a draft, I realized how little I knew about MRIs, and how complicated the topic was. I then proceeded to review all the sources I had used for the diagram and started from the most basic level up. Most of the sources I used agreed on the same points, so that was a problem I had anticipated that I didn't have to worry about. However, most of them used technical language and concepts that I had to research thoroughly to be able to explain them in simpler terms and my own words on the paper. Another conflict that I ran into while writing the paper was precisely this: trying to explain things so that they would be as clear as possible.


As I was writing my paper, I realized that I was drifting away from my diagram, so I decided to read through it several times and edited it to match my diagram, which I think explained the topic with a clear structure. I then added a few more details to my diagram, so that it was clear how they were both related. I also asked one of my hall-mates to look at the diagram first and then read the paper, and then give me feedback on how I could improve my paper to make everything even more straightforward, which was, in my opinion, one of the most helpful things I did.


One of the trials I ran into was editing my sources, because although I used an online editor (www.bibme.org) for my citations, for some reason Microsoft Word would keep deleting them, or organizing them alphabetically instead of according to where they were in the text and what number they corresponded to, which was extremely frustrating as I had to keep going back and editing them time after time.


The most challenging part of this assignment for me was, not only finding appropriate resources, but most of all actually explaining everything in a transparent and straightforward manner. I think that independent research and writing papers are great tools to learn about a specific topic, and feel like I learned a lot thanks to this project. Ultimately, despite all the hard work, I enjoyed writing it and learning something that I had no idea about by myself.