Smart phone? This one practices medicine!
Before we get to the story about the incredible cell phone application, let me introduce our newest contributor and author of this blog post, Thomas Burnett. That’s Tom pictured on the left, doing a mighty fine stunt known as the Liberty, back when he was a cheerleader at Rice University. After studying for his PhD in the history of science at the University of California, Berkeley, he went on to work at the National Rehabilitation Hospital in Washington, D.C.
Take it away, Tom!
There’s an app for that! Cell phones can do almost everything, right? What if you could use your cell phone to tell whether or not you are sick? This may sound like science fiction fantasy, but its true! Scientists working with professor Dan Fletcher at UC-Berkeley have developed a cell phone attachment that functions like a microscope, enabling for quick diagnosis of disease. Additionally, it’s portable, allowing you to use your “CellScope” anywhere in the world that has cell phone reception.
This innovation has profound implications for global health. Microscopy is a critical tool for modern medicine, but due to costs of equipment and training, it is unavailable in many rural and developing areas. Unfortunately, these are the very places where diseases such as tuberculosis, sickle cell disease, and malaria ravage local populations.
The CellScope is simple to operate. It attaches to an ordinary camera phone and allows you to take a digital picture of the microscopic image that you see. A health care worker can take a small fluid sample from a patient, prepare it on a slide, and snap a photo. You only need a few hours of training to be able to do this yourself! Determining whether the photographic image indicates infection still requires someone with extensive medical training, but since the CellScope can send the image anywhere in the world, help is only a phone call away. (more…)
