Large-field-of-view Chip-scale Talbot-grid-based Fluorescence Microscopy

TL;DR

This paper introduces a compact, low-cost chip-scale fluorescence microscopy platform called Fluorescence Talbot Microscopy (FTM) that offers large field-of-view imaging with high resolution, suitable for clinical and biological applications.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel chip-scale fluorescence imaging system utilizing the Talbot effect to achieve large FOV and high resolution in a compact form factor.

Findings

Resolution of 1.2 microns achieved

FOV of 3.9 mm x 3.5 mm demonstrated

Effective imaging of fluorescently labeled cells

Abstract

The fluorescence microscope is one of the most important tools in modern clinical diagnosis and biological science. However, its expense, size and limited field-of-view (FOV) are becoming bottlenecks in key applications such as large-scale phenotyping and low-resource-setting diagnostics. Here we report a low-cost, compact chip-scale fluorescence-imaging platform, termed the Fluorescence Talbot Microscopy (FTM), which utilizes the Talbot self-imaging effect to enable efficient fluorescence imaging over a large and directly-scalable FOV. The FTM prototype has a resolution of 1.2 microns and an FOV of 3.9 mm x 3.5 mm. We demonstrate the imaging capability of FTM on fluorescently labeled breast cancer cells (SK-BR-3) and HEK cells expressing green fluorescent protein.