Aydogan Ozcan, a professor of electrical engineering and bioengineering at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science, and his team have created a portable smartphone microscope attachment that can be used to detect viruses and bacteria without the need for bulky and expensive microscopes and lab equipment. The device weighs less than half a pound.
"This cellphone-based imaging platform could be used for specific and sensitive detection of sub-wavelength objects, including bacteria and viruses and therefore could enable the practice of nanotechnology and biomedical testing in field settings and even in remote and resource-limited environments," Ozcan said. "These results also constitute the first time that single nanoparticles and viruses have been detected using a cellphone-based, field-portable imaging system."
The fluorescent microscope device fabricated by a 3-D printer contains a color filter, an external lens, and a laser diode. He says that it can capture clear images of bits of material less than one-thousandth of the width of a human hair. Using the device, which attaches directly to the camera module on a smartphone, his team of researchers was able to detect single human cytomegalovirus particles. In a separate experiment, they also detected nanoparticles as small as 90 to100 nanometers.
To verify these results, researchers in Ozcan's lab used other imaging devices, including a scanning electron microscope and a photon-counting confocal microscope. These experiments confirmed the findings made using the new cellphone-based imaging device.
