Researchers from UCLA have recently developed a lens-free microscope, designed to uncover the existence of cancer or other cellular level irregularities with the same precision and accuracy as its larger and more expensive optical microscope counterparts. The advent of such a device can help deliver a cost-effective portable technology for performing routine tests of tissue, blood, and other medical endeavors. The new technology may also be quite useful in inaccessible regions of the body and in cases where large samples must be quickly evaluated.
This new technology is the latest in a series of computational imaging and diagnostic tools designed by the lab of Aydogan Ozcan, who is the Chancellor’s Professor of Electrical Engineering and Bioengineering at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute professor. Prior to the lens-free microscope, Ozcan and his team produced custom designed smartphone apps that provided immediate analysis of food samples for allergies, water samples for contamination such as bacteria or metals, cell counts in blood samples, and the utilization of Google Glass to process the results of medical diagnostic exams.
“While mobile health care has expanded rapidly with the growth of consumer electronics — cellphones in particular — pathology is still, by and large, constrained to advanced clinical laboratory settings,” said Ozcan.
Therefore, this latest innovation from Ozcan labs is the first of its kind. With the lens-free microscope, high quality 3D tissue imaging can be performed which offers a new perspective and perhaps approach to dealing with fatal diseases like cancer.
“This is a milestone in the work we’ve been doing. This is the first time tissue samples have been imaged in 3D using a lens-free on-chip microscope,” said Ozcan, who also serves as the associate director of UCLA’s California NanoSystems Institute.
The lens-free microscope operates by using a laser or light-emitting-diode to illuminate a tissue or blood sample that has been put on a petri dish and inserted into the device. From there a sensor array on a microchip, which is the exact same chip used in digital cameras and smartphone cameras, to document and record the pattern of shadows created by the specimen under examination.
The device renders these images or patterns into an assortment of holograms, creating 3D images of the pattern and providing medical professionals a unique visual depth of field vantage point. The images are then colorcoded which allows the samples to be easily compared and make the irregularities or abnormalities easier to recognize.
Ozcan and his team used the device using pap smears in order to locate cervical cancer cells. Furthermore, pathologists use the device alongside more traditional microscopes and found that the diagnoses using the lens-free microscope proved accurate 99 percent of the time. One other added advantage of the lens-free microscope is that it delivers images that are considerably larger in area, or field of view, as opposed to those produced by conventional microscopes, allowing for abnormalities to be spotted and processed at a higher rate.
