Beiruting News

The camera on your iPhone could soon help save your life by testing to see if you have cancer in just a few minutes.

Scientists have developed a device that clips onto the smartphone and could even eventually be used at home.

Their device uses the powerful cameras available now on most smartphones in combination with tiny beads that bind to cancerous cells.

Using a smartphone app, these images can then be sent to a central computer for analysis and then the result returned in less than 45 minutes.

The scientists behind the device, based at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, say it can even return results within two minutes.

They have already tested their device to detect cervical cancer in tissue samples obtained during smear tests.

However, they say the system - known as digital diffraction diagnosis or D3 - can be adapted to screen for other types of cancers and they have already begun a trial testing for lymphoma.

By attaching specific antibodies to the beads, it is possible to make them bind to these molecules, meaning they will gather around a cancerous cell in a tissue or blood sample.

A tissue sample taken from a biopsy or blood from a simple finger prick could be mixed with these labelled microbeads and then placed on a slide.

This is then inserted into a module that can be clipped onto the camera of a smartphone.

An LED at the back of the module illuminates the sample on the slide and an image is taken by the camera on the phone. The scientists used an iPhone 4S in their tests.

When clumped around a cell, the beads alter the way the light passes through the sample by scattering it into distinctive diffraction patterns.

This can be detected by a central computer that looks for these distinctive patterns.