Lensless fluorescent on-chip microscopy using a fiber-optic taper

Abstract

We demonstrate a lensfree on-chip fluorescent microscopy platform that can image fluorescently labeled cells over ~60 mm(2) field-of-view with <4 urn spatial resolution. In this lensfree imaging system, micro-objects of interest are directly located on a tapered fiber-optic faceplate which has > 5-fold higher density of fiber-optic waveguides in its top facet compared to the bottom facet. For excitation, an incoherent light source (e.g., a simple light emitting diode--LED) is used to pump fluorescent objects through a glass hemi-sphere interface. Upon interacting with the entire sample volume, the excitation light is rejected by total internal reflection process occurring at the bottom of the sample substrate. Fluorescent emission from the objects is then collected by the smaller facet of the tapered faceplate and is delivered to a detector-array with an image magnification of ~2.4X. A compressive sampling based decoding algorithm is used for sparse signal recovery, which further increases the space-bandwidth-product of our lensfree on-chip fluorescent imager. We validated the performance of this lensfree imaging platform using fluorescent micro-particles as well as labeled water-borne parasites (e.g., Giardia Muris cysts). Such a compact and wide-field fluorescent microscopy platform could be valuable for cytometry and rare cell imaging applications as well as for micro array research.