A high-performance cell-phone based polarized microscope for malaria diagnosis.

Abstract

We present a cell-phone based polarized microscope for diagnosing malaria through hemozoin recognition over a wide field-of-view (FOV) accompanied with decent image performance. The system is constructed based on attachment method using a lens assembly as objective, two mobile phones and two linear polarizers. A ~0.92 μm resolution across a FOV of ~3.27 mm × 3.27 mm with high imaging quality is realized, demonstrating an increased resolving power, four times improvement in FOV and better imaging quality over mobile-optical-polarization imaging device. Importantly, we also demonstrate it has capability of recognizing hemozoin within the sample for malaria diagnosis by imaging malaria-infected blood samples with similar sensitivity comparable to Leica microscopy. It is more compact, portable, and insensitive to alignment, making it highly suitable for malaria detection in a portable, easy to setup and use way in low-resource areas.