Summary:
UCLA researchers in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering have developed a wide field-of-view (FOV) computational imaging method using lens-free on-chip microscopy to efficiently and cost-effectively scan biological samples such as pathology slides.
Background:
Wide field-of-view (FOV) and high-resolution imaging is crucial for various applications in biomedical and physical sciences. Such tasks demand microscopes to have large space-bandwidth products (SBP) with minimal spatial aberrations that distort the utilization of the SBP of the imaging system. Conventional lens-based digital microscopes can achieve high resolution imaging over a large FOV using mechanical scanning stages to capture multiple images from different parts of the specimen, and these images are then digitally stitched together. This scanning approach, however, demands a relatively bulky and expensive imaging setup. On the other hand, recent advances in digital components and computational techniques have nurtured powerful imaging methods and when this is combined with the state-of-the-art image sensor technology it has made lenses unnecessary in certain microscopic imaging tasks. Therefore, there is a clear need to implement these lens-free developments to improve the FOV for various applications such as microscopic imaging.
Innovation:
UCLA researchers in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering have developed an on-chip microscopy device that can achieve a very high numerical aperture of 1.4 across a large field-of-view (20.5 mm2) without any lenses. This widefield on-chip microscope enables users to digitally focus on a plane and produce color images of transparent tissue samples including pathology slides. The device’s simple, compact and lens-free design offers an invaluable solution to expensive and often cumbersome traditional microscopy, making this on-chip microscopy platform highly appealing for high-resolution and widefield imaging applications
Potential Applications:
- Microscopy
- Digital pathology
- Histology
- Diagnostic image analysis
Advantages
- Lens-free
- Enables color imaging of connected tissue samples (e.g., pathology slides)
- High resolution
- Wide-field imaging
- Improved signal to noise ratio
Development to Date: The invention has been successfully demonstrated.
Related Papers:
Synthetic aperture-based on-chip microscopy
Reference:
UCLA Case No. 2014-9AG