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'Microscope On A Chip' Created

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Los Angeles Times

Published: August 2, 2008

LOS ANGELES - Researchers at California Institute of Technology have developed a "microscope on a chip" using an inexpensive magnifying system that relies on a light-sensing chip instead of lenses to achieve the power of a conventional microscope.

The chip could be incorporated in an iPod-size device that could be used by rural physicians to detect malaria parasites in blood, by hikers to identify microbes in stream water and by oncologists to detect cancer cells in the blood of chemotherapy patients.

Such devices could be readily made using current technology and should be available in about five years. The device would probably cost about $100, said designer Changhuei Yang, a Caltech bioengineer, less than a standard microscope.

The key to the device is a thin layer of metal with a few hundred tiny holes, one above each pixel in the light-sensing chip, Yang wrote Thursday in the journal Nature.

The device would be extremely rugged because "there's no lens to break," Yang said.

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