Rice University researchers have developed a rapid malaria test that uses a laser pulse, eliminating the need to draw blood.

The test has not yet been tried on humans with the disease, but in experiments with blood samples and mice, it detected malaria when only one red blood cell in a million was infected, with no false positives, the inventor said.

The results were described in a study published online last week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In theory, said the inventor, Dmitri O. Lapotko, a physicist who studied laser weapons in his native Belarus, the technology can be used in a device powered by a car battery and is rugged enough to work in dusty villages. With a fiber-optic probe attached to a finger or ear lobe, the device could screen one person every 20 seconds for less than 50 cents each.