Single lens off-chip cellphone microscopy

Within the last few years, cellphone subscriptions have widely spread and now cover even the remotest parts of the planet. Adequate access to healthcare, however, is not widely available, especially in developing countries. We propose a new approach to converting cellphones into low-cost scientific devices for microscopy. Cellphone microscopes have the potential to revolutionize health-related screening and analysis for a variety of applications, including blood and water tests. Our optical system is more flexible than previously proposed mobile microscopes and allows for wide field of view panoramic imaging, the acquisition of parallax, and coded background illumination, which optically enhances the contrast of transparent and refractive specimens

CrowdCam: Instantaneous Navigation of Crowd Images Using Angled Graph

We present a near real-time algorithm for interactively exploring a collectively captured moment without explicit 3D reconstruction. Our system favors immediacy and local coherency to global consistency. It is common to represent photos as vertices of a weighted graph, where edge weights measure similarity or distance between pairs of photos. We introduce Angled Graphs as a new data structure to organize collections of photos in a way that enables the construction of visually smooth paths. Weighted angled graphs extend weighted graphs with angles and angle weights which penalize turning along paths. As a result, locally straight paths can be computed by specifying a photo and a direction. The weighted angled graphs of photos used in this paper can be regarded as the result of discretizing the Riemannian geometry of the high dimensional manifold of all possible photos. Ultimately, our system enables everyday people to take advantage of each others' perspectives in order to create on-the-spot spatiotemporal visual experiences similar to the popular bullet-time sequence. We believe that this type of application will greatly enhance shared human experiences spanning from events as personal as parents watching their children's football game to highly publicized red carpet galas.Swiss National Science FoundationEuropean Commission (ERC grant #210806 4DVideo, 7th Framework Programme (FP7/2007- 2013)

The relationship of serum asymmetric dimethylarginine concentrations and lung involvement in patients with COVID-19 infection

Aim: COVID-19 infections the tissue through angiotensin converting enzyme 2 receptor, which is also expressed on endothelial cells. Endothelial dysfunction may be associated with lung involvement. Asymmetric dimethylarginine (ADMA) is an indirect marker of endothelial dysfunction. The aim of our study was to evaluate ADMA concentrations and to identify its association with lung involvement in patients with COVID-19 disease. Methods: We included 42 patients with COVID-19 infection and lung involvement (Group 1). Forty-two age and sex matched patients without pneumonia acted as the control group (Group 2). All patients gave blood samples for ADMA at the 1st month control visit after discharge. We compared C-reactive protein (CRP) and ADMA concentrations in addition to routine biochemical parameters between groups. Results: Patients with lung involvement had higher admission glucose, CRP, and ADMA concentrations, and displayed lower hemoglobin concentration and lymphocyte count compared to patients without lung involvement. Although patients with lung involvement had higher ADMA concentrations with respect to those without; plasma ADMA levels were also higher than normal values in control group. Multivariate analysis identified log CRP concentration (OR= 3.047, 95% CI=1.881-5.023, p<0.001) as the independent predictor for lung involvement. And, there was a correlation between ADMA and CRP (r: 0.318, p: 0.003). Conclusion: We revealed elevated ADMA concentrations as the surrogate of endothelial dysfunction in COVID-19 patients whether they have pneumonia or not