The cake-box sized diagnostic device can measure a blood clot's consistency and weight, to within a thousand millionth of a gram.

It will help doctors better assess patients' disease risks and develop medical treatments for them.

It may also assist the study of micro-blood clots in capillaries involved in lung failure related to COVID-19.

"We can now measure the stickiness of the blood clot down to a single platelet," optical engineer Steve Lee said on Thursday.

The new portable device advances the room-sized prototype made by Australian National University scientists in 2018 and can now fit on a hospital bench.

It uses high-speed optical fibre technology - known as coherent optical scattering and interferometry (COSI) - to create 3D holographic images of patients' platelets.

Dr Lee said existing imaging tools are too slow to capture single platelets, which are tiny blood cells that help your body form clots to stop bleeding.

"COSI has a very fast and high-resolution imaging process, so it can capture the behaviour of individual platelets before they clump together," he said.

The ANU team are currently trialling COSI on a variety of patient samples with National Platelet Research and Referral Centre medical researchers.

They hope the device will be in production for hospital use within two years.

The team's work was published in the Biophysical Journal.

Australian Associated Press