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A Student Optics WorkshopHwa Chong Institution, Singapore

November 15th, 2012

An Exploration of Nifty Portable Dental and Medical Imaging Techniques Using

Personal Hand Phone Cameras

Ronian Siew

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Today’s workshop might be something a little bit out of the ordinary. Why? Because I haven’t the slightest clue what the outcome is going to be. Earlier this year, I had this crazy thought that it might be fun for some students to come up with extraordinary ways to use their personal hand phone cameras for humanity. You’re all going to think of yourselves as pioneers for a kind of technology which may enable doctors, dentists, and nurses to use their personal hand phones to analyze teeth, skin, or whatever at anywhere and at anytime.

Source: http://www.gizmag.com/cellscope-mobile-microscopes/11463/

People are already finding all sorts of uses for hand phone cameras. Here’s a guy using it as a microscope by attaching some lenses in front of the camera.

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In the February 2012 issue of the highly respected professional magazine Optics and Photonics News, there was an entire article dedicated to highlighting the use of next generation hand phone cameras for scientific applications

Source: Optics & Photonics News, February, 2012

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What we’re going to do today

(1) For the first 20 – 40 min, I’ll help you review some basic things about light, optics, cameras, and human eyes that might come in useful. I’ll also attempt …*ahem*… “ATTEMPT” … to demonstrate one way to convert a hand phone camera into something other than itself for our application. Why do I say “attempt”? Because just like yourself, I haven’t done this before too. I might have thought about it a little, dreamt about it, read about it, imagined it, …etc..etc. But I haven’t tried it. You are allowed to laugh at me. It’s ok. But wait until you guys get your turn haha. Just kidding. In the end, maybe we could all laugh at ourselves.

(2) Next, it’s all up to you guys. You’re going to play. Explore. Try, Fail. Try again. Think a little bit about what went wrong. And then keep trying different things. You’re going to figure out how to attach some optics onto your hand phones (safely and without destroying your phones) and convert them into a portable device for photographing teeth, skin, and who knows what else. Be creative. There aren’t any rules. And I don’t have a “cookbook” recipe for you to follow. I don’t have any step-by-step process for you like they normally do in your lab classes. I hope you’ll discover that in real life, you make your own rules when you experiment. There aren’t any grade scores. If your invention is useful to people, that’s the ultimate reward. And even if it didn’t work as well as you wanted it to, who cares? It’s not like you could be an expert in like 2 hours right? The journey is the reward. But imagine if it DID work. Imagine if your stuff can be used for humanity. You could blog about it. You could post it up on Facebook. You can tell people about how they can use your stuff to help other people. Don’t just think about the commercial uses of it. Think about helping people. After all, that’s what medical devices are for in the first place.

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What we’re going to do today (continued…)

(3) One of the things inventors and engineers do is to record down as many characteristics as they can about their prototype. For example, what are the focal lengths of the lenses you had used? Can you sketch a diagram of your prototype and show where the light goes? So please try as best as you can to document your work. One reason for doing this is also because I will be trying to input some of your data (depending on how much time we have) into my professional optical imaging design software to compare and demonstrate how your stuff in real life can actually be simulated in a virtual environment. This would be a very brief introduction to how the professionals do it when they experiment and theorize about their prototypes.

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Oh and one more thing…

After all this is done, I’m going to work together with your teachers to write up a little article about our little adventure today. Then I’m going to talk to some people I know at a world famous optical engineering software company. And then I’m going to see if we could get this stuff published on their website. Sound good? So if you want your stuff to look good on there, it’s probably a good idea to give it your best shot when you do your experiments today. It doesn’t mean you can’t fail. Failure is a part of life. It’s a part of inventing things. It’s a BIG part of coming up with a product. And it’s certainly an enormous part of trying to help humanity.

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Oh and one LAST thing…

Please have fun exploring. We could be doing some things today that many may not have ever done before in the world. And when you’re doing something new, there’s usually a high chance of failure. But here’s how I see it: Doing something completely new and failing is far more impressive than succeeding at doing something totally unoriginal.

Thanks Guys,Ronian