10/23/2011
Engineers at a California university have found another “serious" use for Lego bricks: pairing them with a smartphone with a camera and turning them into a smart petri dish that can be used for medical diagnostics.
The engineers from the California Institute of Technology said the device can be used for medical diagnostics, and to image cell growth continuously.
“Our ePetri dish is a compact, small, lens-free microscopy imaging platform. We can directly track the cell culture or bacteria culture within the incubator. The data from the ePetri dish automatically transfers to a computer outside the incubator by a cable connection. Therefore, this technology can significantly streamline and improve cell culture experiments by cutting down on human labor and contamination risks," said Guoan Zheng, lead author of the study and a graduate student in electrical engineering at Caltech.
Dubbed ePetri, the device built from Lego blocks and a smartphone as a light source can perform an imaging of cell cultures.
It removes the need for bulky microscopes and significantly reduces human labor time, while improving the way where the culture growth can be recorded.
The technology is particularly adept at imaging confluent cells—those that grow very close to one another and typically cover the entire petri dish, CalTech said.
Since the late 1800s, biologists used petri dishes primarily to grow cells. In the medical field, they are used to identify bacterial infections, such as tuberculosis.
The conventional use of a petri dish requires that the cells being cultured be placed in an incubator to grow. As the sample grows, it is removed, often numerous times, from the incubator to be studied under a microscope.