Researchers hope that a new kind of small portable microscope may give health workers the ability to quickly and cheaply scan blood for tumor cells and life-threatening parasites.Scientists shine light onto a liquid sample flowing through a narrow channel. Below the channel are a series of three-micron-wide apertures, or holes, punched through a layer of metal such as gold or aluminum. The light shines through the holes onto a semiconductor chip studded with a series of sensor pixels. Such chips cost about $10 a pop, says Caltech bioengineer and study leader Changhuei Yang.
Objects that float over the apertures block some of the incoming light received by the pixels, which reconstruct an image of the object based on the variations in light intensity across multiple apertures.
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