According to the World Health Organization, over 216 million people were infected with malaria in 2016, and 445,000 individuals died from the disease. The key to solving this health crisis is early-stage diagnosis when malaria therapeutics are most effective. A new prototype for a portable instrument capable of early-stage malaria detection has been developed by a team of researchers at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. There are two standard ways of diagnosing malaria—yet both have limitations.
The first involves taking a blood sample from a person and looking at it underneath a microscope for red blood cells that have been infected with the malaria parasite. This involves counting cells—which is manually intensive and dependent on the technician reading the blood smears. The second approach, known as the rapid diagnostic test (RDT), works in about 15 minutes. However, without…
