Making microscopy portable is the vision of CellScope developer Associate Professor Daniel Fletcher and his colleagues at UC Berkeley. He explains in the video posted here that the ability to take images wherever you happen to be and transmit them to a clinician has major potential for improving health care in developing countries where to a large extent microscopes are not available. The medical uses of the CellScope are described this week in a SEED Magazine report that is based on a PLoS One article titled Mobile Phone Based Clinical Microscopy for Global Health Applications.
CellScope also swings doors open to a new virtual science hall for learning! The student with a CellScope on her mobile can explore and learn the microscopic world in the same manner as a medical worker can, for example as the PLoS article describes: image “P. falciparum-infected and sickle red blood cells in brightfield and M. tuberculosis-infected sputum samples in fluorescence with LED excitation.” There are educational applications in biology, geology, ecology, forensic science, health, and many other subjects.
For learning, there is profound parallel potential to the distance-microscopy described by Professor Fletcher in the video. The CellScope can take student science into rich real world venues. A student with a CellScope can do remote fieldwork, sending images to teachers and laboratories for instruction about what she has captured from the microscopic real world.
Don’t you think it will not be long before the mobile manufacturers will include magnifying lenses in their cams?
