Editor’s note: The Vodafone Americas Foundation Wireless Innovation project, sponsored by the Global Philanthropy Forum and NetSquared, set out to find and fund the most innovative applications of wireless technology that addresses critical global issues. This post, an interview with the team that developed CelloPhone, is the third in a series of three posts featuring the winners.

Project: CelloPhone

Team: Dr. Aydogan Ozcan, Dr. Neven Karlovac, Dr. Yvonne Bryson, Electrical Engineering Department, University of California at Los Angeles

TakePart: At what point in time did you realize that you were on to something that had not been done before?

Lensfree imaging for cytometry and diagnostic applications has been at the focus of my research for the last few years. My group at UCLA has achieved several milestones specifically over the last 15 months that made our technology extremely competitive with enormous capabilities for various biomedical applications impacting both the developed and the developing countries.

TP: What roadblocks do you anticipate, if any, when implementing your application on a large scale?

We envision that within the next two-three years this CelloPhone platform will be developed into a wireless health device that is suited for more advanced tests to be performed at the physician’s office, right at the point of care.

Therefore, we also see the CelloPhone concept revolutionizing the telemedicine applications in the developed parts of the world, including the U.S. One application that could make a significant impact would be the detection of GI tract infections at the point of care, which could significantly reduce insurance costs by eliminating the costly intra-steps that are currently involved in these clinical bacterial tests. By being able to get these test results right at the doctor’s office, we will also avoid a second patient visit to the office, which further reduces the costs associated with medical tests in the developed world.

TP: What are the major differences between your innovation, CelloPhone, and the CellScope?

We’ve developed a revolutionary high-throughput and compact optical cell counting and characterization platform termed “Lensless Ultra-wide-field Cell monitoring Array platform based on Shadow imaging” (LUCAS) that will be used to specifically analyze bodily fluids within a regular cell phone.

The LUCAS platform permits detection of the digital holograms of cells or bacteria of interest within any solution of interest using a regular cell phone. Holographic shadow signature of a given cell/bacteria sample provides an extremely rich source of information regarding the count, type and state of the sample. This high-throughput imaging platform is quite innovative in several ways:
• It does not require any lenses or other bulky mechanical components; and therefore offers a very compact and cost-effective imaging platform that can easily be merged with existing cell phones.
• The field of view that LUCAS can monitor without any lenses is >10 cm^2, which is more than 100 fold larger than any existing optical microscope.
• LUCAS can monitor a depth-of-field of ~0.5 cm which further improves its throughput by ~10 fold when compared to lens based optical imaging.

These major advantages imply that the LUCAS platform can improve the throughput of optics based medical tests by orders of magnitude for detection of diseases such as malaria even within a lensfree and cost-effective wireless unit, such as a commercial cell phone device.

TP: Regarding the library of images, will this database potentially be incorporated into the proposed health care IT infrastructure in the US?

To speed up the process of diagnostics, a central workstation that serves tens to hundreds of mobile CelloPhone units would be ideal – not only to process the acquired holographic signatures for comparison against the LUCAS library, but also to record the patient data/history at the central hospital. The results can then be text messaged back to the users of the CelloPhone.

TP: What’s next for you and your team?

In resource-limited settings, such as in the villages of Africa, there exists no infrastructure to conduct even very simple medical tests such as blood counts. To combat various infectious diseases, such as malaria and HIV, there is an urgent need to be able to analyze bodily fluids such as whole blood samples in a cost-effective and simple way that can even be conducted by minimally-trained personnel.

For instance, for HIV+ patients, the World Health Organization recommends that the patient is tested every few months for his/her CD 4 Tcell Lymphocyte count to assess the course of the disease. This is also a vital test to understand when to start the anti-viral drug therapy and to understand how the patient responds to it. Likewise, monitoring the white blood cell and red blood cell count is also critical for assessing drug toxicity for antivirals and the treatment diagnosis of many other infectious diseases. For such blood tests to be performed in the field, we need wireless technologies that can capture the micro-scale signatures of various blood cells even in resource-poor settings. And cell phones offer a great match for this purpose.

Our innovative wireless-health technology that runs on a regular cell-phone would significantly impact the global fight against infectious diseases in resource-poor settings such as in Africa, parts of India, South-East Asia and South America. Through widespread use of this revolutionary technology, the health care services in the developing countries will be significantly improved – making a real impact in the life quality and life expectancy of millions. Towards this end, the Vodafone Americas Foundations Wireless Innovation Project provided a great opportunity for us to further take it into practice.

You can watch this video for more information: