Many skin diseases are defined by the presence of neutrophils, which are among the first cells to respond to infection and inflammation. Currently, neutrophil identification in the skin is costly and slow. The objectives of the present work are to investigate the feasibility of detecting the presence of neutrophils in live skin microsamples using chemiluminescence and develop a device and procedures that will enable preclinical and clinical investigations. Our approach consists of collecting skin microsamples and exposing them to reagents that activate neutrophils and amplify the light emission produced by chemiluminescence.Experiments using live pig skin with and without inflammation show that it is feasible to detect the presence of neutrophils in the skin. The proposed method is minimally invasive, simple, fast, and does not require user specialization.The developed system is compact in size with a small footprint, which makes it portable and suitable for point-of-care diagnostics.

The concept and design of a mobile phone-based fluorescence microscope to identify dermatophytes has been demonstrated in a prototype and laboratory samples. The concept and design offer a simple, low-cost, compact but robust method for identification of fungal pathogens. This method is shown to be feasible for detecting fluorescence accurately and imaging the fungal structure at a resolution of 100 µm or better. Lasers Surg. Med. © 2018 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.