ASU team develops disease diagnostic tool

PHOENIX -- An Arizona State University bioengineering team is working on a device that could lead to a quicker diagnosis of diseases in some parts of the world.

Unlike an MRI machine, the Integrascope is quiet and about the size of your wallet.

"What we're trying to do is reduce it -- to something that's almost the size of a large smart phone," says ASU professor Antonio Garcia, who worked with graduate student John Schneider to design the device.

Garcia said the device can diagnose diseases in about two minutes from small drops of samples from patients. That is far faster than the 20 minutes it takes the equipment that most hospitals use.

"So fast and simple, gives you a picture of not just whether this person has a disease, but also some other important markers of what the patient is experiencing, whether there are other things that are off," Garcia said.

"The instrument works on tiny common light-emitting diodes, like you would see in a lot of the electronics we have nowadays. And even the traffic lights nowadays have a series of light-emitting diodes.

Garcia said the idea behind the name is that the patient's sample is integrated with the instrument.

"And the drop of the patient's sample actually becomes the lens upon which the light from a very ordinary light-emitting diode, an LED, is actually focused."

The device could cost doctors as little as $15, and Garcia and his co-developers hope to market it to developing countries.