These days gout is diagnosed by spotting monosodium urate crystals within synovial fluid sampled from patients’ joints. This requires a compensated polarized light microscope (CPLM), a device large and heavy enough to remain in the hospital laboratory, preventing its use at the point-of-care. Moreover, these types of microscope have an inherently narrow field-of-view and so make it difficult to see a sample all at once, and so impeding a much easier diagnosis.
UCLA researchers have now come up with a lens-free polarized microscope that has both a wide field-of-view and high-resolution, and featuring a color contrast comparable to that of CPLM. It’s cheap and easy to make, light, and can be made portable for use in different environments.
The microscope uses lens-free on-chip holographic imaging that passes light through a polarizer, sample, and then another polarizer before hitting an optical sensor. A computer then processes the data and constructs an image of what’s under the microscope. The entire image hitting the sensor remains in-focus and at high resolution, providing about 25 square millimeters of field of view, which is about 100 times more than with conventional optical microscopy.
Study in journal Scientific Reports: Wide-field imaging of birefringent synovial fluid crystals using lens-free polarized microscopy for gout diagnosis…
Via: UCLA…