Medical Diagnosis: There's An App for That!
The mantra of "keep it simple" was a cornerstone of Steve Jobs and Apple innovation. In some ways it was also the inspiration for Dr. Sebastian Wachsmann-Hogiu and his research team at UC Davis, who successfully converted an iPhone into an inexpensive, highly effective medical imaging device. Even Steve Jobs, who was notoriously obsessive in maintaining the integrity of Apple products, would be proud of this simplistic, innovative use of his invention
A 5x magnification ball-lens that was secured in a layer of rubber and taped on the iPhone camera, successfully converted the smartphone into a powerful microscope. Although not as effective as an average laboratory microscope, the iPhone camera/microscope, with the help of rendering software, provides high resolution images of cellular tissue. This iPhone conversion could provide a rapid and cost-effective approach to disease diagnosis.
As if a homemade microscope wasn’t enough, they also converted an iPhone into an inexpensive spectrophotometer with a plastic tube and electrical tape. A spectrophotometer measures the specific light wavelength patterns created when a chemical structure bends light. The light patterns, like a rainbow, act as a fingerprint, which can be used to identify specific chemical structures. An iPhone spectrophotometer could prove valuable in the identification of important chemical markers associated with various diseases.
An iPhone used as a legitimate medical device is indeed novel. However, there are plenty of invaluable high-tech medical diagnostic tools that likely perform at a much greater level than a simple iPhone. This begs the question; do we actually need an iPhone microscope or an iPhone spectrophotometer? Is there a valid use for an iPhone as a medical diagnostic tool or is this research simply a fun scientific diversion that is banking on the popularity of a fancy mobile phone?
It’s true that the iconic stature of the iPhone is an attention grabber and it is possible that the iPhone popularity played an important role in the original inception of this study; however, this study is far greater than a simple phone. By using lateral thinking and innovation, Dr. Wachsmann-Hogiu’s research team provided a novel and inexpensive technology that could be very useful in both medical diagnosis and biomedical research.
This is truly important, as scientific funding during the recent US economic woes has been severely cut. Healthcare costs are also at an all-time high. The need to develop cost-effective high quality technology is essential for the survival and progression of biomedical research and healthcare. What is even more interesting, however, is the iPhone microscope and the iPhone spectrophotometer, along with other inexpensive science equipmentsuch as the newly developed OpenPCR machine, are important forerunners in a contemporary biomedical revolution.
As science technology becomes increasingly affordable, more people not associated with industry or academia are pursuing scientific research, leading to the creation of home-based labs and garage science. If the garage innovation is as half as effective in the biomedical revolution as it was in the computer revolution, we are in for quite an exciting decade.
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