Abstract
We report the development of an add-on, chip-based, optical module—termed the Microfluidic-based Oil-immersion Lenses (μOIL) chip—which transforms any stereo microscope into a high-resolution, large field of view imaging platform. The μOIL chip consists of an array of ball mini-lenses that are assembled onto a microfluidic silicon chip. The mini-lenses are made out of high refractive index material (sapphire) and they are half immersed in oil. Those two key features enable submicron resolution and a maximum numerical aperture of ~1.2. The μOIL chip is reusable and easy to operate as it can be placed directly on top of any biological sample. It improves the resolution of a stereo microscope by an order of magnitude without compromising the field of view; therefore, we believe it could become a versatile tool for use in various research studies and clinical applications.
Highlights
Stereo microscopes are low-end, low-cost, imaging instruments, mainly used in the field of biology and medicine [1]
The amount of light collected by a lens that affects its resolution can be quantified by its numerical aperture (NA): NA = nM·sinθ where nM is the refractive index of the medium that the lens is immersed into and θ is the half angle of the cone of rays collected by the lens
We evaluated the optical performance of a standard stereo microscope (Olympus SZ61, Tokyo, Japan) when the μOIL chip is used as an add-on module
Summary
Stereo microscopes are low-end, low-cost, imaging instruments, mainly used in the field of biology and medicine [1]. Research efforts towards low cost, compact imaging systems have focused on utilizing microlenses [7,8,9,10] and microlens arrays [11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26] optofluidic microscope [27,28] or even tomographic imaging methods [29,30] These approaches demonstrated high-resolution imaging, they typically lack the flexibility and versatility of a stereo microscope where the user can adjust the focus and magnification or the illumination conditions depending on the sample that is being imaged. The combined stereo microscope/μOIL chip system is an ideal tool for research studies and clinical applications where sub-micron and large field of view imaging is required
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