Engineer  Aydogan Ozcan, assistant professor of electrical engineering and a member of the California Nanosystem Institute at UCLA has adapted the ubiquitous mobile phone to do the work of microscopes in screening for diseases and formed a company Microskia to commercialse the technology.

In one a prototype, a slide of a finger prick of blood can be inserted over the phone's sensor which detects the contents and sends the information wirelessly to hospital or health centre. The phone can detect asymmetric shapes of diseased blood or  abnormal cells or an increase of white blood cells, signalling infection.

Since the magnification can be done electronically there is no need for optics.
For this electronic system of magnification, inexpensive light-emitting diodes added to the basic cellphone shine their light on a sample slide placed over the phone’s camera chip.

Some of the light waves hit the cells suspended in the sample, scattering off the cells and interfering with the other light waves. The camera records that hologram or interference pattern as a series of pixels.

Holograms are rich in information, Dr Ozcan said. “We can learn a lot in seconds,” he said. “We can process the information mathematically and reconstruct images like those you would see with a microscope.”

Neven Karlovac, CEo of Microskia in Los Angeles, said some of the company’s products would be adaptations of regular cellphones. For phones without cameras, or phones too compact to modify, the company has different designs, including a simple box with a sensing chip that can be plugged into a cellphone or laptop with a USB cord.