Inventor: Professor Aydogan Ozcan
Invention: LUCAS

A major obstacle in providing quality healthcare to third world country residents is the distance between the healthcare facilities and the patient. This is especially true for people living in remote villages. The healthcare workers always wish for devices which they can take with them for field testing. As far as testing the blood is concerned, they can rest assured now. A research team from UCLA, led by Professor Aydogan Ozcan,  invented LUCAS (an acronym for Lensless Ultra-wide-field Cell monitoring Array platform based on Shadow imaging) around 2007, and made improvements to it over time. Now, the technology has been tweaked so that it can be incorporated into a cell phone; and blood can be viewed and analyzed using it.

LUCAS was developed by a team of researchers (Note: the team included Sungkyu Seo, Ting-Wei Su, Derek Tseng and Anthony Erlinger) led by Professor Aydogan Ozcan. Prof. Ozcan is the author of the book “Non-destructive Optical Characterization Tools”, one of the recipients of the 2008 Okawa Foundation Research Award and recipient of the 2009 IEEE Lasers & Electro-Optics Society (LEOS) Young Investigator Award. He holds 12 US patents, 1 UK patent and has 9 pending patent applications.

Professor Ozcan added some common components to an ordinary Sony Ericsson cell phone, thus incorporating LUCAS technology into it. Once this was done, the cell phone produced a remarkable image of human blood, showing the thousands of cells inside it.

So, how does LUCAS work? It illuminates a sample of blood (or saliva, or any fluid, for that matter) on a laboratory slide using a short wavelength blue light. LUCAS then captures the image to a chip in the cell phone. The cell phone has a program stored inside it, which counts the microparticles. If needed, this image is transmitted wirelessly to a computer. The computer does the analysis and sends the results as a text message back to the cell phone.

Now, this is not as simple as it sounds. One difficulty is that the cells are different in shape. The UCLA research team has developed an algorithm for counting these cells with 90% accuracy.

The major advantage of LUCAS is that it is small and inexpensive (the device, including the cell phone, will cost only around $50 more), thus making it very suitable for usage by healthcare workers and volunteers in third world countries for conducting blood tests, including HIV tests.

There is still scope for improvement, and Prof. Ozcan readily admits it. One issue is that when there are a lot of cells in a sample, counting all of them becomes a bit difficult. The team is trying to improve the accuracy. Another question is whether the device can identify similar looking bacteria accurately. Yet another potential issue is the lack of cellular network coverage in third world countries.

Once the device is fine-tuned, it will become a cost effective and easy way to conduct blood tests in third world countries.