Photonics for a Better World

What a great idea! Aydogan Ozcan's group at University of California, Los Angeles, have developed a way to use the cell phone in a lens-free computational microscopy system utilizing digital inline holography to create on-chip imagers. The technique enables in-the-field testing for diseases such as malaria from remote locations, enabling faster and more universal diagnosis and thereby helping to save more lives. In addition to Aydogan's interview last month with SPIE Newsroom in August 2011, more information from the group about the project and the technology is at these links: Ozcan Research Group website Handheld, lensless microscope identifies malaria parasites (SPIE Newsroom article from Ozcan lab) Smart technology for global access to healthcare (SPIE Newsroom article by Aydogan Ozcan)

Three aspiring biophotonics  entrepreneurs working on potentially life-saving techniques for detecting cancer and malaria have won some expert help in moving their ideas to market. As winners of a Biophotonics Startup Challenge at SPIE Photonics West in January, the three are being sponsored by Newport Spectra-Physics to attend the Biomedical Engineering Entrepreneurship Academy at the University of California, Davis, next summer. A cheek-swab test for lung cancer would be "a paradigm shift, in that we don't need to examine the tumor itself to determine the presence of cancer," said Hariharan Subramanian (Northwestern University) of the technique he and colleagues including Hemant Roy (North Shore University Health System) and Vadim Backman (Northwestern) have developed. Hariharan Subramanian describes for Biophotonics Startup Challenge judges the technology behind a cheek-swab test for lung cancer. A system based on total internal reflection principles that...