Biomed. Opt. Express 3, 991–1005 (2012)

Credit: © 2012 OSA

Tests for diagnosing malaria should ideally be rapid, low-cost, accurate and portable. Currently, the most popular approach is still the manual examination of a blood sample under a microscope, despite being expensive and time-consuming. An international collaboration of researchers from Israel, Italy, Spain and Germany has now developed an alternative optical approach that promises fast, automated and accurate detection of malaria. The scheme, called secondary speckle sensing microscopy, involves irradiating a blood sample in a microfluidic chip and imaging the unfocused speckle pattern of a single red blood cell. Analysis techniques such as fuzzy logic and principal component analysis can then be used to distinguish between healthy and infected cells, which have different speckle pattern characteristics. The researchers say that one of their future goals is to expand the technique such that it can determine the exact stage of the disease.