Turning a $40 Needle Into a $250,000 Live-Specimen Microscope

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A University of Utah team discovered a method for turning a small, \$40 needle into a 3-D microscope capable of taking images up to 70 times smaller than the width of a human hair. This new method not only produces high-quality images comparable to expensive microscopes, but may be implanted into the brains of living mice for imaging at the cellular level. The study appears in the Aug. 18 issue of the journal Applied Physics Letters. Designed by Rajesh Menon, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, and graduate student Ganghun Kim, the microscope technique works when an LED light is illuminated and guided through a fiberoptic needle or cannula. Returned pictures are reconstructed into 3-D images using algorithms developed by Menon and Kim.“Unlike miniature microscopes, our approach does not use optics,” Menon says. “It’s primarily computational.” He says this approach will allow researchers not only to take images far smaller than those taken by current miniature microscopes, but do it for a fraction of the cost.“We can get approximately 1-micron-resolution images that only \$250,000 and higher microscopes are capable of generating,” Menon says. “Miniature microscopes are limited to the few tens of microns.”Menon hopes to extend the technology

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