ASU team turns smartphone into a powerful microscope in the fight against infectious diseases

With smartphones millions of times more powerful than the NASA Apollo computers that sent us to the moon in the 1960s, scientists have been eager to adapt them back here on Earth to better the planet. That’s exactly what ASU Biodesign Institute researcher Tony Hu and postdoctoral researcher Dali Sun have recently demonstrated in the fight against infectious diseases. They’ve developed a simple mobile technology for clinics, hospitals and health organizations that are on the front lines of triaging outbreaks around the world. The innovation takes a $60,000 state-of-the-art technology, called dark-field microscopy, and shrinks the cost down to $2,000 in the hopes of making health-care diagnostics more affordable to limited-resource areas, particularly in the developing world. Like watching a movie with the lights turned low, dark-field microscopy is a powerful tool for scientists to see more clearly brightly lit samples against a black background, allowing for better contrast. They hope turning smartphones into handheld...