Rotation rate measurement of a microfluidic biodisk spinner and automatic adjustment for the pulsed light source

Abstract

This study presents a design for a light field inspection system of a biodisk and spinner, which uses a digital camera attached a light filter below to inspect the fluorescence from the biodisk. The pulsed light is a single frequency-controllable light source that is spread over the biodisk. When the frequency of pulsed light is equal to the rotation rate of the spinner, the rotating biodisk would appear to be static due to the persistence of vision effect. The excitation light source (same as the pulsed light) is used to excite the reaction area in the biodisk, and the biochemical reaction emitted fluorescence is recorded in the monitor. Using the continuous image sequence calculation and measuring the variation of the rotating rate for the spinner, and by adjusting the frequency of pulsed light source, the rotational speed of the biodisk and the pulsed light frequency can be synchronized. We also propose a rule for high-speed image processing and low consumption of memory space. By properly judging the rotational speed of the biodisk spinner and quickly inspecting the biodisk, very large amounts of data can be handled. If the images acquired from the camera are processed individually, there will be drawbacks such as slow image acquisition speed and loss of image information. Therefore, we take a multi-task mechanism to use sufficient image buffer areas to increase the speed of acquiring images while processing the images with adjusting the memory spaces efficiently.