New handheld medical scanners coupled with regular cell phones resemble "Star Trek" tricorders and could see what ails you with a push of a button. The invention, using off-the-shelf cell phone technology, would allow medical scanners could boldly go where none have gone before - to the aid of the roughly three-quarters of the world's population currently without access to ultrasounds, X-rays and other imagers used for everything from detecting tumors to monitoring fetuses.

With an innovative concept developed by engineers at the University of California, Berkeley, the ubiquitous cell phone could one day be used to make medical imaging accessible to billions of people around the world.