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The 2.5 pound microscope was developed by Rice University alumnus Andrew Miller, as his senior design project last year.

The goal was to make an inexpensive, portable, and highly capable microscope that could be used in clinics in developing countries that have limited access to lab equipment and may lack electricity.

Miller and colleagues at The Methodist Hospital Research Institute (TMHRI) analyzed samples from 19 patients suspected of having TB, an infectious disease that attacks the lungs and can be fatal if not treated.

The instrument, called the Global Focus microscope, performed just as well as the lab’s reference-standard fluorescence microscope. The team reported similar findings were obtained in 98.4 percent of the samples tested.

The microscope was built with off-the-shelf parts encased in a rugged plastic shell Miller created with a 3-D printer.  Light to power the 1,000-times magnification microscope comes from a top-mounted LED flashlight.

Details appear in the journal PLos One.

Miller and Rice have contracted with a medical device consultant, 3rd Stone Design, to produce 20 microscopes that will be ready for field testing next month.

“The World Health Organization estimates that 1.3 million people died from tuberculosis in 2008,” says Rebecca Richards-Kortum, the Stanley C. Moore Professor of Bioengineering at Rice.

“Andy’s microscope, which is portable, durable, and inexpensive, could be used to diagnose tuberculosis in community or rural health centers with limited infrastructure in the developing world, promoting early detection and successful treatment of the disease.”

The trial used TB smear samples from Tehran, Iran. Ahmad Bahrmand, former TB laboratory director of the Pasteur Institute of Iran, brought sputum smear samples from the infected patients when he came to work for Edward Graviss, director of the TMHRI Molecular Tuberculosis Laboratory.

Four days of blind testing of 63 smear samples, including control slides, confirmed the Global Focus microscope was every bit as capable as the lab’s more sophisticated instrument in identifying positive smear specimens.

“This is hugely significant as a point-of-care tool clinicians can use for tuberculosis patients, whether they’re in Asia or Africa or even in West Texas,” Graviss says.

“The first identification of TB is usually made with a smear, and it will be good to know that in the field instead of having to wait three or four days to get the smear to a lab.

“The idea was to compare a field-grade type microscope with what we see in a standard TB laboratory, such as what we have at Methodist,” he says.

“When we compared the results between the two microscopes, there was no significant difference. The quality is there, and you’re not going to miss anything by using one of these point-of-care microscopes.”

The program was supported by a grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute through the Precollege and Undergraduate Science Education Program.

More news from Rice University: www.media.rice.edu/media/