Abstract
The increasing capabilities and ubiquity of mobile phones and their associated digital cameras offer the possibility of extending low-cost, portable diagnostic microscopy to underserved and low-resource areas. However, mobile phone microscopes created by adding magnifying optics to the phone's camera module have been unable to make use of the full image sensor due to the specialized design of the embedded camera lens, exacerbating the tradeoff between resolution and field of view inherent to optical systems. This tradeoff is acutely felt for diagnostic applications, where the speed and cost of image-based diagnosis is related to the area of the sample that can be viewed at sufficient resolution. Here we present a simple and low-cost approach to mobile phone microscopy that uses a reversed mobile phone camera lens added to an intact mobile phone to enable high quality imaging over a significantly larger field of view than standard microscopy. We demonstrate use of the reversed lens mobile phone microscope to identify red and white blood cells in blood smears and soil-transmitted helminth eggs in stool samples.
Highlights
The need for disease diagnostics in resource limited settings is well known [1] and has inspired a number of researchers to investigate the possibilities of implementing simple and low-cost microscope systems based around mobile phone cameras [2,3,4,5]
A primary difficulty in doing standard optical microscopy with a mobile phone camera is that achievement of high resolution over a large field of view requires multi-element lens groups to reduce aberrations caused by high collection angles and multiple wavelengths
The need to fill such a wide angular field of view presents limitations for mobile microscopy with either ball lenses or conventional microscope objectives, but this problem can be solved by the use of a reversed mobile phone camera lens as an objective (Figure 1)
Summary
The need for disease diagnostics in resource limited settings is well known [1] and has inspired a number of researchers to investigate the possibilities of implementing simple and low-cost microscope systems based around mobile phone cameras [2,3,4,5]. Such systems leverage the worldwide ubiquity of mobile phone networks together with the image capture and processing power of the phones to create portable devices for disease screening and diagnosis. Mobile phone microscopes are intended for use far from a central hospital, so the field of view and resolution of a single image must both be maximized in order to minimize cost and enable rapid and reliable diagnosis
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