Towards ultra-low-cost smartphone microscopy

The outbreak of COVID-19 exposed the inadequacy of our technical tools for home health surveillance, and recent studies have shown the potential of smartphones as a universal optical microscopic imaging platform for such applications. However, most of them use laboratory-grade optomechanical components and transmitted illuminations to ensure focus tuning capability and imaging quality, which keeps the cost of the equipment high. Here, we propose an ultra-low-cost solution for smartphone microscopy. To realize focus tunability, we designed a seesaw-like structure capable of converting large displacements on one side into small displacements on the other (reduced to ∼9.1%), which leverages the intrinsic flexibility of 3D printing materials. We achieved a focus-tuning accuracy of ∼5 𝜇m, which is 40 times higher than the machining accuracy of the 3D-printed lens holder itself. For microscopic imaging, we used an off-the-shelf smartphone camera lens as the objective and the built-in flashlight as the illumination. To compensate for the resulting image quality degradation, we developed a learning-based image enhancement method. We used the CycleGAN architecture to establish the mapping from smartphone microscope images to benchtop microscope images without pairing. We verified the imaging performance on different biomedical samples. Except for the smartphone, we kept the full costs of the device under 4 USD. We think these efforts to lower the costs of smartphone microscopes will benefit their applications in various scenarios, such as point-of-care testing, on-site diagnosis, and home health surveillance. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: We propose a solution for ultra-low-cost smartphone microscopy. Utilizing the flexibility of 3D-printed material, we can achieve focusing accuracy of ∼5 𝜇m. Such a low-cost device will benefit point-of-care diagnosis and home health surveillance.