Chapter 8 - On-Chip Holographic Microscopy and its Application for Automated Semen Analysis

Abstract

Despite the rapid pace of progress in optical imaging technologies, lens-based light microscopy still remains relatively complex, bulky, and costly, making its translation difficult for field applications or resource-limited settings. To mitigate these existing challenges, a compact, cost-effective, and yet wide-field lensless imaging platform that utilizes partially coherent light sources has recently been introduced for conducting microanalysis on a chip. In this chapter, we review the fundamental principles of this lensless microscopy platform and its application toward automated semen analysis. Providing a compact, lightweight, and cost-effective imaging architecture, lensless on-chip microscopy enables automated quantification of the count, speed, and the dynamic trajectories of sperm over a large imaging field of view of, for example, 24 mm 2 using amplitude and phase reconstruction images. Such a field-portable automated semen analysis platform running on a wide-field lensless on-chip microscope could be especially important for andrology laboratories, fertility clinics, personal male fertility tests, as well as for field use in veterinary medicine such as in stud farming and animal breeding applications.