Abstract
Over the last decade microfluidics has created a versatile platform that has significantly advanced the ways in which micro-scale organisms and objects are controlled, processed and investigated, by improving the cost, compactness and throughput aspects of analysis. Microfluidics has also expanded into optics to create reconfigurable and flexible optical devices such as reconfigurable lenses, lasers, waveguides, switches, and on-chip microscopes. Here we present a new opto-fluidic microscopy modality, i.e., Holographic Opto-fluidic Microscopy (HOM), based on lensless holographic imaging. This imaging modality complements the miniaturization provided by microfluidics and would allow the integration of microscopy into existing on-chip microfluidic devices with various functionalities. Our imaging modality utilizes partially coherent in-line holography and pixel super-resolution to create high-resolution amplitude and phase images of the objects flowing within micro-fluidic channels, which we demonstrate by imaging C. elegans, Giardia lamblia, and Mulberry pollen. HOM does not involve complicated fabrication processes or precise alignment, nor does it require a highly uniform flow of objects within microfluidic channels.
Highlights
Opto-fluidics is an emerging field that aims to merge the available toolset of optics and microfluidics to create more flexible and reconfigurable optical devices with novel functionalities that can be incorporated into lab-on-a-chip platforms [1,2,3]
We present a new opto-fluidic microscopy modality, i.e., Holographic Opto-fluidic Microscopy (HOM), based on lensless holographic imaging. This imaging modality complements the miniaturization provided by microfluidics and would allow the integration of microscopy into existing on-chip microfluidic devices with various functionalities
Our imaging modality utilizes partially coherent inline holography and pixel super-resolution to create high-resolution amplitude and phase images of the objects flowing within micro-fluidic channels, which we demonstrate by imaging C. elegans, Giardia lamblia, and Mulberry pollen
Summary
Opto-fluidics is an emerging field that aims to merge the available toolset of optics and microfluidics to create more flexible and reconfigurable optical devices with novel functionalities that can be incorporated into lab-on-a-chip platforms [1,2,3]. Microfluidics enabled on-chip digital microscopy could especially be important for global health problems to assist diagnosis of disease (e.g., malaria or tuberculosis) in remote locations, and holds significant promise for point-of-care operation and for telemedicine applications if a sufficiently high spatial resolution and throughput can be achieved on the same platform For this purpose, here we demonstrate a new method to conduct lensfree opto-fluidic microscopy, which relies on partially coherent digital in-line holography and multi-frame Pixel Super-Resolution [19] to create high-resolution on-chip images of the objects that are flowing within a micro-fluidic channel. The insensitivity to the exact position of the objects in our approach allows the use of microfluidic channels with large cross-sections, enabling simultaneous imaging of objects of different sizes and alleviating the known problem of clogging in small channels, both of which offer important advantages for the design, fabrication and operation of our opto-fluidic microscope compared to existing approaches
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