Microscope on a chip could be implantable

Last Friday's Science Friday on NPR featured a really exciting segment on a "microscope on a chip," an ingenious, $10 method for building a microscope using a digital camera controller. The 17-minute segment runs through a number of potential applications for this, from cellphone microscopes that could autonomously identify hazardous bacteria in water samples (for cameraphones, the cost of implementing microscope functionality is about $1), to implanting cancer-detecting scopes in high-risk patients, to putting hundreds of microscopes on a single chip for massively parallel sampling and testing.


Researchers have developed a micro-microscope. Writing in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists at Caltech describe the creation of an on-chip, lens-free microscope that they say could be built for about ten dollars. The device uses a screen of tiny holes mounted above a CCD sensor to image liquids flowing through microscopic channels in the chip. Such a microscope chip could provide high-resolution microscopic images in field instruments for tasks such as blood screening and water testing. We'll talk with one of the inventors of the device about its potential uses

Micro Microscope (broadcast Friday, August 1st, 2008)