Stain-free, rapid, and quantitative viral plaque assay using deep learning and time-lapse holographic imaging (Conference Presentation)

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

We present a stain-free, rapid, and automated viral plaque assay using deep learning and holography, which needs significantly less sample incubation time than traditional plaque assays. A portable and cost-effective lens-free imaging prototype was built to record the spatio-temporal features of the plaque-forming units (PFUs) during their growth, without the need for staining. Our system detected the first cell lysing events as early as 5 hours of incubation and achieved >90% PFU detection rate with 100% specificity in <20 hours, saving >24 hours compared to the traditional viral plaque assays that take ≥48 hours.