As a pathology resident, this is the kind of thing that makes me wonder if I should be looking for a new job. But everything radiology does is digital, and they haven't run out of radiology jobs, so maybe the future's not so bad...
Wells, it seems like drastically lowering costs for tools would if anything, increase demand for pathology expertise. Also, Ozcan's work has mostly been focused on developing countries - opening up new markets if you want to look at it that way.
Medical equipment manufacturers might have more to worry about, but I'd guess the amount of regulation involved will probably buffer them long enough to adapt to any changes.
What's most fascinating to me about Ozcan's work is the amount of computational photography involved for getting usable images. A few years back it was mostly MATLAB but I imagine now you could write shaders that run right in the phone GPUs...
Graduation rates for pathologists are stagnant or falling, and case loads are rising as people get old and cancerous.
Hopefully CAD tools will speed you up, rather than put you of a job. Having worked with pathologists, I think digital has a ways to go before it replaces you entirely.
Pathology resident here. I really like this hack, but a fair amount of my work is at higher magnification, and requires much better correction. However, I have been very impressed with the magnifi by arcturus labs. If you already have a scope and just want to take pictures, I highly recommend it. I can take better pictures with my iphone 5 and my magnifi than some folks seem to be able to take with their far more expensive dedicated cameras. http://arcturuslabs.com/
> I can take better pictures with my iphone 5 and my magnifi than some folks seem to be able to take with their far more expensive dedicated cameras.
Similarly, I have a friend who just bought a high-power field scope (land->land viewing instead of land->sky) and also found an adapter for the iPhone camera. Same thing happened there. The quality of his pictures is great for what it is and it's a tiny fraction of the cost of a SLR attachment or other type of digital camera.
The difference here is you get digital images, so you can push the hack further and do any kind of App you'd like (for instance taking multiple picture while moving the object and reconstitute a big picture of the full object, or whatever you can think of)
Of course it may be possible to attach a camera to the microscope you show, it just seems more complicated.
Do you not understand what "digital" means? The kids microscope is the lens, not the image recorder. If you set up an attachment to hold your smartphone in front of the viewpiece, then anything that your eye can see can be digitized.
"CELLSTAGRAM" - Instagram for cellular structures? j/k. This is an amazing hack, I remember when we were in school, we barely had access to a microscope. It was fascinating seeing the world from that perspective and always wished we could experiment with it further. This is a great hack, especially for under-privileged schools and kids in our region of the world (Lebanon, Middle East).
This is definitely going to be the next weekend project with my kids. They are so scared of spiders (daddy long legs in particular, our house has thousands of them).
Time to show the girls what they look like at 175x magnification!
Maybe start with something that they want to see close up. For example, have each one pick something rough, something smooth, something that grows, a small toy, etc.
If your kids are anything like mine, starting by forcing them to confront a fear will just make them hate the technology and they'll be less willing to participate the next time you want to do a cool project with them.
Would this also work for non-Apple phones? The article seems to be very specific about only mentioning iThings. Is there something about them the others don't have that is required for this?
The iThing specificness probably comes from the dimensions of the stand you need to make to hold the phone.
Just tried holding the 15mm eyepiece off my old school microscope (optical) in front of the lens on my blackberry. The Thinkpad trackpoint fills the circular image field nicely (and it shows all the crud down there, so I'm cleaning it out with a brush now). Very sensitive to having the axes coincident.
Anyone any idea about the focal length of the LED pointer lens?
Indeed! I was going to remark the same. Also a side effect of digital zoom is that it is not perfectly sharp. You see this already in the example pictures. After all, digital zoom is more of an effect then real zooming. For this reason I never use digital zoom on a digital camera. On my PC I have software that does a better job :)
> Using tape, rubber and a tiny glass ball, researchers transformed an iPhone into a cheap, yet powerful microscope able to image tiny blood cells. They’ve also added a clinical-grade cellphone spectroscope that might be able to measure some vital signs.
> And with a few dollars and some patience, you can do the same to your own phone. (See instructions below.)
> “It still amazes me how you can build near-research-grade instruments with cheap consumer electronics,” said physicist Sebastian Wachsmann-Hogiu of the University of California at Davis, leader of a study March 2 in PLoS ONE. “And with cellphones, you can record and transmit data anywhere. In rural or remote areas, you could get a diagnosis from a professional pathologist halfway around the world.”
I don't know about this particular implementation, but MAKE Magazine recently featured a similar DIY project (although this one doesn't use an iPhone, and instead projects the image onto a wall).
There was a recent Kickstarter selling a 15X lens recently: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/968523355/micro-phone-le... but this is closer to the work Dr. Aydogan Ozcan has been doing at UCLA. They started 3D printing custom backs for dumbphones years ago. An article from 2009: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/08/business/08novel.html
It looks like they've moved to smartphones now: http://dailybruin.com/2013/09/27/ucla-team-invents-microscop... and they can now resolve "a single virus" and nanoparticles down to 90-100nm: http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/ucla-researchers-smartp...