Re:Stanford bioengineer develops a 50-cent paper microscope
by frozenport on Tuesday March 11, 2014 @09:54PM
(#7383479)
I do like one thing, this has the potential to inspire kids about optics. I sure would have loved to have one growing up!
These point of care services aren't limit by the cost of the microscope, they are limited by staff and the cost of histology. Most of the scopes I see at the clinic are cheap brightfield ones used to look at stained specimens, and are kept as backups when the Beckman-Colter machine fails. Can your microscope distinguish white blood cell morphology? Working with live cell imaging you learn that red-blood cells are evil because they carry no detail and little information, they are trivial to see and deconvolve. You can see relevant features even if you are beyond the diffraction limit, but then again you need those fancy slides that spread the cells out so that you can inspect them one-by-one.
These point of care services aren't limit by the cost of the microscope, they are limited by staff and the cost of histology. Most of the scopes I see at the clinic are cheap brightfield ones used to look at stained specimens, and are kept as backups when the Beckman-Colter machine fails. Can your microscope distinguish white blood cell morphology? Working with live cell imaging you learn that red-blood cells are evil because they carry no detail and little information, they are trivial to see and deconvolve. You can see relevant features even if you are beyond the diffraction limit, but then again you need those fancy slides that spread the cells out so that you can inspect them one-by-one.
I see no new science and an attempt to address non-existent problems and seems way out of touch with the needs of medical staff. The test for malaria looks something like this: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a2/PLDH_Mala... http://www.csinnovation.com.sg/upload_files/8/Anti_Malaria_H...
tldr: We knew you could do this hundreds of years ago, it won't change the world because it didn't then.