Abstract
We demonstrate the design and application of an add-on device for improving the diagnostic and research capabilities of CellScope—a low-cost, smartphone-based point-of-care microscope. We replace the single LED illumination of the original CellScope with a programmable domed LED array. By leveraging recent advances in computational illumination, this new device enables simultaneous multi-contrast imaging with brightfield, darkfield, and phase imaging modes. Further, we scan through illumination angles to capture lightfield datasets, which can be used to recover 3D intensity and phase images without any hardware changes. This digital refocusing procedure can be used for either 3D imaging or software-only focus correction, reducing the need for precise mechanical focusing during field experiments. All acquisition and processing is performed on the mobile phone and controlled through a smartphone application, making the computational microscope compact and portable. Using multiple samples and different objective magnifications, we demonstrate that the performance of our device is comparable to that of a commercial microscope. This unique device platform extends the field imaging capabilities of CellScope, opening up new clinical and research possibilities.
Highlights
Optical microscopy is an important tool for disease screening and diagnosis throughout the world; access is often restricted to centralized hospitals due to the cost and complexity of imaging hardware
The Computational CellScope hardware involves a custom-built domed LED illuminator attached to an inverted variant of the CellScope smartphone-based microscope platform
Our domed illuminator hardware is compatible with all smartphones and tablets that are used with the existing CellScope, including the iPhone 4S, 5, 5S, and 6 (Apple, Inc.), as well as several Android devices
Summary
Optical microscopy is an important tool for disease screening and diagnosis throughout the world; access is often restricted to centralized hospitals due to the cost and complexity of imaging hardware. Compact microscopes based on mobile phones, including CellScope [13, 14], have demonstrated that microscopy can PLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0124938. Multi-Contrast Imaging and Digital Refocusing on a Mobile Microscope be effectively performed outside of hospitals and diagnostic laboratories by minimally trained healthcare workers, that images can be transmitted for confirmation of diagnosis, and that phone-based computational analysis can be used to provide automated diagnosis. These mobile microscopes complement a host of other new devices for health monitoring on smart phones [15,16,17,18]. We demonstrate a new variation of the CellScope microscope which incorporates recently developed techniques of computational illumination [19,20,21] to enable new imaging modalities, including darkfield, phase imaging and digital refocusing
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