Mobile Laboratory Diagnostics Using 3D-printed Microscope Adapters

Misdiagnosis of diseases due to the lack of microscopical examination capacity has taken its toll: high mortality rates, drug resistance, economic burden and distrust in local medical practitioners. While microscopes are available to most clinics, there is a lack of trained lab technicians who can process the images. Leveraging recent advances in mobile phone camera-based microscopy, automated lab testing to be carried out with existing microscopes and ubiquitous smartphones would be available. Using 3D printers to produce a hardware adapter for virtually any model of smartphone will enable clinics to easily capture and transmit images using a mobile phone and available microscopes. The appropriate software would automate diagnostic tasks (not focusing on a single pathology), leading to either a local automated diagnosis (lab-on-the-phone) or the transmission of images to a central server where a human expert would review the data.