Smart phone-microscope and app aids researchers in diagnosing parasites in the field

"Low-tech" would be the term for the level of equipment doctors and health care workers often prefer or have available in working in remote or highly-underserved areas. In many ways, this classic medical equipment serves them well, and allows them to provide care when otherwise the residents in these regions may receive little if any at all. However, in some instances, low-tech equipment cannot help doctors identify certain pathogens which may affect their ability to rapidly diagnose and provide the correct treatment. Enter, the smart phone enabled microscope. With this handy bit of high-tech, doctors and the health care team can now go where it has been generally not possible to go concerning diagnosis of certain disease and investigation of certain tissue and organs in the human body.

Daniel Fletcher of the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleagues report in a recent article in Science Translational Medicine a camera-phone microscope and app that permits rapid identification of the African eye worm parasite Loa loa in blood samples. Loa loa develops into a worm that wiggles into eye tissue, and becomes an even bigger proble if is acquired with two other parasitic nematodes, Onchocerca volvulus (causes river blindness) and Wuchereria bancrofti (causes severe limb swelling). This compounded problem results from the existence of one drug, called ivermectin, used treat the two other parasites can cause induce unintended brain swelling if a person also has L. loa infection.


How does the smart phone/microscope help in this regard? Well, camera-based microscopes have been used for several years in the field, but a major limitation was that once you prepared a specimen, by blood collection and smearing blood on a slide, all the phone-based scope could do was magnify and provided no real way to improve up what a typical microscope could do. This new device, developed by Fletcher and associates allows someone to insert blood in a capillary tube into 3D-printed plastic case with a magnifying lens. The plastic case then can be placed around an iPhone, putting the lens and sample directly over the camera.


The app that corresponds to this device "records video of the magnified blood sample and uses an algorithm to look for movements in the fluid that match up with characteristics of L. loa. Based on this, the app accurately counts how many parasites are present. It has to be used around midday, during the brief period when L. loa typically are active but the other two nematodes are not."


The potential for modifying this device and application for use in detecting other parasites is clearly there. Other researchers are already hot on the trail in developing phone software to detect soil-based parasites like hookworm and whipworm. So, as smart phones become more pervasive in society and, and we find them in use in the far reaches of the world, we can be sure someone is thinking about not just how to get the best signal or download rates. There are scientists and doctors out there really putting these devices into practice in helping treating those that likely would go untreated. Technology and medicine is a great combination.

#science   #medicine   #biomedicaltechnology   #smartphone  #microscope   #diagnosis   #parasites   #bloodborne   #Africa   #app  #research