Blood cells focus light in low-cost computational imaging system that is on par with a microscope
by Neil Savage, special to C&EN
By hacking a Blu-ray drive and smearing blood on a sensor, researchers have created an inexpensive imaging system for studying microscopic samples, including measuring bacterial growth and doing urinalysis (ACS Sens. 2022, DOI: 10.1021/acssensors.1c02704).
April 20, 2022 | A version of this story appeared in Volume 100, Issue 14
Getting sharp images of a whole slide using a conventional optical microscope can require manually refocusing the microscope repeatedly over different parts of the sample—a time-consuming process. And scanners that can automatically image a whole sample at high resolution are expensive, costing $50,000 to $300,000. So Guoan Zheng, who runs the Smart Imaging Lab at the University of Connecticut, and his colleagues were looking for a way to perform such imaging quickly and cheaply.https://cen.acs.org/analytical-chemistry/imaging/hacked-Blu-ray-player-drop/100/i14?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Newsletter&utm_campaign=CEN