Clip-on technology turns your smartphone into a microscope

Australian researchers have created a 3D-printable ‘clip-on’ that can turn any smartphone into a fully functional microscope, powerful enough to visualise specimens as small as one 200th of a millimetre.

Developed at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Nanoscale BioPhotonics (CNBP), the clip-on technology requires no external power or light source to work, yet offers high-powered microscopic performance in a robust and mobile handheld package. It is capable of visualising microscopic organisms, animal and plant cells, blood cells, cell nuclei and more.

As explained by lead developer Dr Antony Orth, CNBP Research Fellow at RMIT University, the mobile phone microscope takes advantage of the integrated illumination available with nearly all smartphone cameras. It has been engineered with internal illumination tunnels that guide light from the camera flash to illuminate the sample from behind, overcoming issues seen with other microscopy-enabled mobile phone devices.

“Almost all other phone-based microscopes use externally powered light sources while there’s a perfectly good flash on the phone itself,” he explained. “External LEDs and power sources can make these other systems surprisingly complex, bulky and difficult to assemble.

“The beauty of our design is that the microscope is usable after one simple assembly step and requires no additional illumination optics, reducing significantly the cost and complexity of assembly. The clip-on is also able to be 3D printed, making the device accessible to anyone with basic 3D printing capabilities.”

Image courtesy of CNBP/cnbp.org.au via Flickr under CC BY 2.0

A further advantage noted by Dr Orth is that the clip-on enables both bright-field and dark-field microscopy techniques to be undertaken. Bright-field microscopy is where a specimen is observed on a bright background. Conversely, dark-field shows the specimen illuminated on a dark background.

“The added dark-field functionality lets us observe samples that are nearly invisible under conventional bright-field operation such as cells in media,” he said. “Having both capabilities in such a small device is extremely beneficial and increases the range of activity that the microscope can be successfully used for.”

Dr Orth believes the technology has immense potential as an inexpensive and portable tool for all types of on-site or remote area monitoring, with suitable applications including water quality, blood samples, environmental observation, and early disease detection and diagnosis. It has already been tested by Dr Orth and his CNBP colleagues in a number of areas, successfully visualising samples ranging from cell culture, to zooplankton, to live cattle semen in support of livestock fertility testing.

Dr Orth added that the technology would be particularly useful in remote areas and developing countries, where larger standalone microscopes are unavailable or impractical.

“Powerful microscopes can be few and far between in some regions,” he said. “They’re often only found in larger population centres and not in remote or smaller communities. Yet their use in these areas can be essential — for determining water quality for drinking, through to analysing blood samples for parasites, or for disease diagnosis including malaria.”

In addition to publishing their research in the journal Scientific Reports, the researchers are making their technology freely available, sharing the 3D printing files publicly so that anyone with access to a 3D printer can turn their own smartphone into a microscope. The files are available for download from the CNBP website at http://cnbp.org.au/online-tools.

Top image courtesy of CNBP/cnbp.org.au via Flickr under CC BY 2.0