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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…

Imagine having a metal detector handy when you, as an emergency physician, have an unconscious patient come in and you need to know whether he has an implant. Well, you can sort of do it now with the Metal Detector app for Android phones that have magnetometers (ex: HTC T-Mobile G1). It won’t do quite yet, as the magnetometer that’s typically used as a compass isn’t strong enough to detect keys more than an a couple inches away. But as a preview, we can imagine having one of these apps handy on a future, more magnetically endowed, smart phone.