Comment by lhl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lhl | Hacker News Reader

That's a fantastic hack, definitely want to build one. Here's the actual Instructables link: http://www.instructables.com/id/10-Smartphone-to-digital-mic...

There was a recent Kickstarter selling a 15X lens recently: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/968523355/micro-phone-le... but this is closer to the work Dr. Aydogan Ozcan has been doing at UCLA. They started 3D printing custom backs for dumbphones years ago. An article from 2009: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/08/business/08novel.html

It looks like they've moved to smartphones now: http://dailybruin.com/2013/09/27/ucla-team-invents-microscop... and they can now resolve "a single virus" and nanoparticles down to 90-100nm: http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/ucla-researchers-smartp...

As a pathology resident, this is the kind of thing that makes me wonder if I should be looking for a new job. But everything radiology does is digital, and they haven't run out of radiology jobs, so maybe the future's not so bad...

Wells, it seems like drastically lowering costs for tools would if anything, increase demand for pathology expertise. Also, Ozcan's work has mostly been focused on developing countries - opening up new markets if you want to look at it that way.

Medical equipment manufacturers might have more to worry about, but I'd guess the amount of regulation involved will probably buffer them long enough to adapt to any changes.

What's most fascinating to me about Ozcan's work is the amount of computational photography involved for getting usable images. A few years back it was mostly MATLAB but I imagine now you could write shaders that run right in the phone GPUs...

Graduation rates for pathologists are stagnant or falling, and case loads are rising as people get old and cancerous.

Hopefully CAD tools will speed you up, rather than put you of a job. Having worked with pathologists, I think digital has a ways to go before it replaces you entirely.

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