Los Angeles, Oct 10 (PTI) American researchers have developed a portable, light-weight and lens-free telemedicine microscope for fertility testing.
Announcing their finding, scientists at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) said the lens-free microscope has immediate applications for veterinarians measuring the fertility of bulls or other stock animals.
The telemedicine microscope fills an important gap between simple male fertility tests that determine the number of sperm in a sample and more sophisticated systems that also provide information on the movement of individual sperm, they said.
“This technology provides a portable, automated system for semen analysis which could be used in fertility clinics, in personal male-fertility test kits and for veterinary medicine field applications, such as stud farming and animal breeding,” a press release from the ULCA said.
The device can plugs into a laptop and is no larger than a stack of poker chips, it said.
Through the use of a holographic imaging system, the telemedicine microscope can produce phase and amplitude images of saliva, blood, semen and other fluid samples.
The system is capable of instantly counting the number of sperm in a sample, and by comparing 20 holographic images taken over 10 seconds, it can identify which are moving and which are immotile.
Current automated systems are too bulky and expensive for widespread use.
The inventor of the lens-free microscope and an assistant professor of electrical engineering at the UCLA, Aydogan Ozcan said the new device is so small that it can plug into a portable device and can analyse blood, semen, saliva or other liquids.
UCLA said the new microscope can take 20 pictures over 10 seconds, tracking live sperm movement and eliminating guesswork.
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