Holographic pixel super-resolution in portable lensless on-chip microscopy using a fiber-optic array published in Lab on a Chip (2011)

By W. Bishara , U. Sikora , O. Mudanyali , T-W. Su , O. Yaglidere , S. Luckhart and A. Ozcan (2011)


We report a portable lensless on-chip microscope that can achieve <1 µm resolution over a wide field-of-view of 24 mm2 without the use of any mechanical scanning. This compact on-chipmicroscope weighs 95 g and is based on partially coherent digital in-line holography. Multiple fiber-optic waveguides are butt-coupled to light emitting diodes, which are controlled by a low-cost micro-controller to sequentially illuminate the sample. The resulting lensfree holograms are then captured by a digital sensor-array and are rapidly processed using a pixel super-resolution algorithm to generate much higher resolution holographic images (both phase and amplitude) of the objects. This wide-field and high-resolution on-chip microscope, being compact and light-weight, would be important for global health problems such as diagnosis of infectious diseases in remote locations. Toward this end, we validate the performance of this field-portable microscopeby imaging human malaria parasites (Plasmodium falciparum) in thin blood smears. Our results constitute the first-time that a lensfree on-chip microscope has successfully imaged malaria parasites.