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Photography-loving doctors now have more reasons to love their digital cameras. MacGyvers at Rice University and MD Anderson Cancer Center have cleverly engineered your everyday dSLR into a portable, high-resolution fiber-optic fluorescence imaging system that can detect cancer in-vivo.

In this month’s PLoS ONE, they showed off the prowess of their camera system retrofitted with a LED light, an objective lens, a fiber-optic bundle in capturing sub-cellular images non-invasively and in real-time. In field tests of a fluorescence-labeled oral cancer cell culture, a surgically-resected human tissue specimen with dysplastic and cancerous regions, and a healthy human subject in vivo, the fiber-optic microscope resolved individual nuclei in all specimens and tissues imaged to distinguish qualitatively and quantitatively between normal, precancerous and/or cancerous tissues.

Portable and inexpensive at $2000 all-together, the clever device may be a useful tool to assist in the identification of early neoplastic changes in epithelial tissues in spartan clinical settings where MacGyver himself may have been.

PLoS ONE: A Fiber-Optic Fluorescence Microscope Using a Consumer-Grade Digital Camera for In Vivo Cellular Imaging

More from Rice University…

The Help Conquer Cancer Project, thanks to IBM and World Community Grid, is proudly announcing that the distributed computing project is successfully identifying whether protein crystallization within a sample has occurred. Currently undergrad lab techs coupled to a microscope is the technology of choice in X-ray crystallography labs around the world, but now a camera scanning through hundreds of samples can farm out the analysis of those images to thousands of computers worldwide. And you can help by having your computer join the World Community Grid.

From the announcement:

Using the Grid, scientists trained the system to successfully recognize 80% of crystal-bearing images and 98% of the clear drops of protein solution that existed prior to crystallization. This enables six times as many images per protein to be examined compared to human review, and in dramatically less time.

Automating the identification of crystals could speed research in numerous biological science and genetic research projects, as crystallization holds the key for investigating a variety of biological processes. It could also validate the efforts of other projects that seek to obtain protein structures, such as the Nutritious Rice for the World effort, which is also using the Grid to explore ways to create hardier, healthier strains of rice.

Full story: Surplus PC Power Yields Faster Cancer Research

Link: World Community Grid…

Article in Journal of Strutural Functional Genomics: Protein crystallization analysis on the World Community Grid