High-resolution mobile bio-microscope with smartphone telephoto camera lens

Abstract

Bio-microscopy has been widely applied in clinical pathological diagnosis and life science research. At present, bio-microscope mainly used in laboratories is relatively large. With the development of mobile communication technology, the internet of things (IoT) is introduced as a ubiquitous network interconnection of all things. If bio-microscope can be utilized as an IoT sensing node, biomedical point-of-care testing can be carried out anywhere, especially in remote areas. Commercial off-the-shelve optical devices can be widely accessible for micro-imaging, but optical cameras suitable for microscopes are not easily accessible. In this work, smartphone with telephoto camera lens can be handily modified into a mobile microscope by attaching an infinite correction objective before the telephoto camera lens. Undoubtedly, this microscope naturally has wireless communication capabilities. Furthermore, we applied this mobile bio-microscope to perform bright-field and fluorescence microscopic imaging, and the optical resolution can reach 4.4 μm with 40x objective lens. The bright-field microscopic images can be transmitted to a computer through wireless transmission, and be stitch into a large field of view images via digital image algorithms. The fluorescence images can be observed in real time. In the future, combined with wireless network technology, mobile microscopy will become a sensing node for medical big data terminal, providing an important optical platform for on-line biomedical diagnosis.