Research Projects

Cell Counting App

Developing a phone app for cell counting

Santiago Campuzano
University of Ottawa, Canada

cell

COMPLETED

Overview

Who: Santiago Campuzano, master’s student in biology

When: 2019 – 2020

Institutes: University of Ottawa, Canada

Supervisors: Andrew Pelling, professor of physics and biology at the University of Ottawa

Summary

Santiago is developing a mobile app – which he calls SCellyCus – that will allow scientists to use their phone to count cells. The app uses image analysis to detect and count cells in real-time. It also does the math for you—handling the necessary calculations to determine the final concentration of cells. Santiago will also design a 3D printed attachment to hold the phone on the microscope.

: Side view of SCellyCus in action with the custom adapter. Although a wide variety of cellphone-microscope adapters can also be found at Amazon, Santiago found them difficult to fine-tune

: Santiago’s phone attached to his custom microscope-cell phone adapter. He has made the file to 3D print the adapter open source

Why This Matters

Cell counting is a fundamental, but tedious and subjective, part of cell culture research. Most New Harvest research fellows (and in fact, most cell biologists at large) need to count cells before and after experiments. That makes SCellyCus an invaluable tool for the scientific community, in and out of cellular agriculture, to improve throughput and reduce subjectivity in cell counting.

Outcomes

Santiago has coded SCellyCus in Swift – the iOS coding language. The app is currently in beta testing and you can follow its progress on Twitter. The design for the microscope adapter is available, open-source, on Thingiverse.

Read more about SCellyCus in the blog post here!