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4/9/2009

Seeing is believing
Rice senior's tiny microscope will relieve burden on Lab-in-a-Backpack carriers

BY MIKE WILLIAMS
Rice News staff

The backbreaking work of delivering medical care to those in need will get a little less so if the next version of Rice's innovative Lab-in-a-Backpack incorporates Andy Miller's invention.

	JEFF FITLOW
	Senior bioengineering student Andy Miller has designed a compact but powerful microscope that will nestle among the other supplies in a pack that can be carried to otherwise inaccessible locations, like to the residents of remote villages who rarely see a doctor.

The senior bioengineering student has designed a compact but powerful microscope that will nestle among the other supplies in the pack, a product of Rice 360° and Beyond Traditional Borders initiatives that can be carried to otherwise inaccessible locations, like to the residents of remote villages who rarely see a doctor.

Weighing in at about a pound, the microscope Miller manufactured at the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen this year would replace a standard instrument at least four times as heavy and much more fragile. The new scope is built into its own protective case, eliminating the bulky and expensive packing material the original microscope required to keep it from breaking in the field.

His ingenuity was duly recognized this week when Miller won the Best Engineering Design award and second overall in the annual Rice Undergraduate Research Symposium.

With the support of Maria Oden, director of the design kitchen and professor in the practice of engineering education, Miller has been refining his plastic microscope, which incorporates lenses and mirrors and matches the performance of stock instruments. His target price to make each microscope is $180 -- the price of the instrument currently used in the backpack -- and he hopes the final version will be less than that.

"Andy came to me and asked to do an independent study, and when I told him I needed this project done, he grabbed it and ran," said Oden, who has in recent months enjoyed watching collaborations blossom in the new Oshman lab. "Now we need to develop plans to manufacture enough of them to put in the backpacks. It's wonderful to see this develop from an undergraduate project."

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Find out what Rice is planning for the next century Miller, a Sid Richardson College resident who came to Rice from The Woodlands, Texas, is still tweaking the microscope in his final weeks as an undergraduate, but when he started the project he worked very quickly. "From coming up with the idea to having a prototype took less than a month. That, in design terms, is just amazing," he said, crediting the design kitchen for making it possible.

Miller knows of what he speaks. Though his major is bioengineering, he took a year off from Rice to study industrial design in Spain, with an eye toward a career in designing medical devices.

"Before, it would have been impossible to get the kind of help I've had here to design and fabricate the pieces. Bioengineers at Rice just didn't have access to the kind of tools mechanical engineers did until now."

Packed up, the microscope is a white plastic obelisk a little larger than a brick. With the case becoming the base, the microscope is an elegant device that magnifies objects up to 1,000 times through the use of lenses and mirrors. Miller said it's an inverted microscope, because light passes through the upside-down slide and through the lens and is redirected by two mirrors to the eyepiece.

The inverted microscope design utilizes two first-surface mirrors to bend the optical path into a conveniently shaped body.

Even better, Miller's baby doesn't need to be plugged in. Light to power the system comes from any standard flashlight. "This hasn't been done before," he said proudly. "And the wonderful thing is, it's multifunctional. You can take out the flashlight and do an eye exam, do an ear exam, whatever else you need."

Miller said the microscope could have been half its size, but that would have meant using custom lenses. Having settled on standard items that can be easily replaced if broken, he spent three weeks getting the best price. The lenses and mirrors cost about $150, leaving little for the case if the total cost of the device were to hit Miller's target.

The answer was to grow his own plastic case using the Oshman's 3-D printer. "It's the coolest thing in the world," said Miller, who used it to "print" the case he designed in SolidWorks, a program he learned to use in a Rice mechanical engineering class.

The plastic casing should also make for easier field repairs, he said, as a bit of solvent should be able to weld broken bits back together. He expects the cases -- the only custom part in the project -- will eventually be manufactured in batches by injection molding.

Though he's still tweaking the focusing mechanism and working on ways to incorporate fluorescence microscopy, which would greatly increase its value as a field microscope, Miller expects the still-nameless instrument will be part of a backpack Rice will send out into the world this summer.

"I've probably got one or two minor changes before it's finalized, but an important part of designing something is getting feedback," he said. "I'm not looking for perfection -- I'm looking to get it out and get it used as soon as possible."