While this application is medical, not metallurgical, the technology is worth a few seconds of your time…
Being a techie, I am always delighted by new technologies. So imagine when I found out about a $1.50 lensless microscope being demonstrated at Caltech.
As we implement new technologies in our shops we eliminate waste and become both more capable and more efficient.
This Caltech developed microfluidic microscope promises to improve efficiency, capability, and improve medical diagnostics in the third world where cost of detection is often a showstopper.
How do we currently diagnose diseases like malaria or cancer? A skilled technician examines blood samples brought to the lab using a conventional optical microscope.
Laboratory, sample preservation, preparation, and transportation all add “loss” to the process.
With this Caltech device, a system of microscopic channels called microfluidics lead a sample across the light-sensing chip. Samples flow through the channel because of a tiny difference in pressure from one end of the chip to the other. The chip ‘snaps’ images in rapid succession as the sample passes across.
Cells tend to roll end over end as they pass through a microfluidic channel allowing the device create an image of the cell from every angle. This allows the technician to determine its volume and type by viewing the video made by the device. No lenses, no slides, no expensive transportation or sample prep, just in situ testing.
So what do we call this approach? How about ” Subpixel Resolving Opto-Fluidic Microscopy” or “SROFM.”
This $1.50 lendless laboratory, when coupled with the growing ubiquity of cellular phones around the world, could just make a difference in developing world medical diagnostics and outcomes. REAL quality of life benefits from technology.
Full story at MIT Technology Review
We can see this type of application being developed for microtaggants on critical precision machined components for aerospace, medical or security applications where provenance and identity of the component are crucial to the mission…
Tag: Quality of Life
Today is National Tradesmen’s Day.To show our appreciation for the skilled tradespeople that produce, maintain and install in our industry, we’re celebrating National Tradesmen’s Day. We want to honor the folks who work with their hands and apply their minds to our Industry’s challenges.
Our skilled machinists make the world a safer place with the products that they produce.
When we drive our cars, fly in planes, have medical procedures performed, we are truly placing our lives in their good hands.
The electricians that help us install our equipment and assure that no one is exposed to live electrical current are responsible for the delivery of the energy that drives our quality of life.
I am a college graduate and I love what I do.
But I can do it only because tradesmen like our precision machinists made the stuff in the world that makes what I do possible.
Thanks for sharing your talents.
Thanks for making a difference.
Thanks for “working with precision.”
Please join us in thanking these professionals who make our wonderful quality of life possible with the high precision products that they produce.
Photocredit.
All of us have many reasons to be grateful. To be thankful. To consider ourselves blessed.
Here is a link to an article that I wrote for the PMPA pages in Production Machining Magazine. The article will give you a sense of how our industry contributes to the joy and quality of every day life. I hope that you enjoy it. The photo above is what inspired my column.
Thank you for doing your best at whatever it is that you do that makes our world a better place for someone, somewhere.