A team of researchers at UCLA may have come up with a method that will introduce tissue biopsy analysis to places where medical systems currently can’t afford conventional pathology lab equipment. The technology relies on Clarity, a way of removing fat and other materials from tissue samples while leaving proteins and DNA behind, as well as on fairly cheap holographic imaging. The team also relied on light-absorbing dyes that stay effective for a long time, allowing the sample to be imaged some time after performing the Clarity cleansing. The result is an easy way to perform Clarity and a smartphone-sized microscopy device that can peer through the sample and help to find abnormalities.
The prototype microscopy device, which uses a 10-megapixel sensor and powered by algorithms that generate 3D images from the data, took only a few hundred dollars to build. Manufacturing it will make it a lot cheaper, of course.
The team was able to create 3D scans of tissues as thick as 200-μm, which is an order of magnitude thicker than a typical slice of a biopsy sample.