Laser used to test for malaria

New York Times : A revolutionary test for malaria is being developed at Rice University. Instead of requiring a blood sample and a slew of diagnostic chemicals, the new technique uses a low-powered laser to noninvasively detect malaria parasites in a patient’s bloodstream. Those parasites invade the red blood cells and produce nanoparticles called hemozoin. When exposed to a picosecond laser pulse, the hemozoin absorbs the energy from the laser and forms tiny bubbles, which then pop. That pop can be detected acoustically “in the same way a destroyer detects a submarine,” according to Dmitri Lapotko, coauthor of the Rice University research group’s paper , which was published online in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In preclinical tests, the technique was able to detect a single malaria-infected cell among a million normal cells, with no false positives.