Researchers at University of California have made a demonstration with a close-up lens for the iPhone that can screen the photos of blood samples and then send the images to remotely located doctors using the 3G Internet connection. The research team announced the implementation of this add-on in the Optical Society of America's (OSA) Annual Meeting. This diagnosis technique reflects the drastic improvements in the optical microscopic photography.
Today microscopy has come to "micron range" optical photography. The 1.7 micron pixel size of the iPhone's camera in combination with 5X magnification lens, gives the iPhone a microscope function in required the micron-range resolution to diagnose patient samples.
The prototype to test this feature was built with a simple idea of liquid lens. No additional hardware was added to magnify the images. It was done with a drop of water on the top of the phone surface. But the water evaporated soon. Then the team decided to build the prototype with a magnifying lens. Now the doctors count the red cells in blood with the magnified images.
Next the team plans to improve its magnifying lens resolution further, for making other diagnoses such as the skin, as well as develop applications for automatic screening such as counting the number of red blood cells(RBCs) and white-blood cells(WBCs) in a blood sample image. The world is shrinking as the technology expands..................
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