Blood-coated sensor for high-throughput ptychographic cytometry on a Blu-ray disc

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel high-throughput cytometry device that integrates a blood-coated sensor with a modified Blu-ray drive, enabling rapid, high-resolution imaging of biological specimens over large fields of view for diagnostic applications.

Contribution

It introduces a blood-coated sensor integrated into a Blu-ray drive for lensless, high-throughput ptychographic cytometry with unlimited field of view and single-cell resolution.

Findings

Achieved 435 nm resolution on test targets.

Can analyze ~10,000 cells per second.

Demonstrated applications in urinalysis and bacterial monitoring.

Abstract

Blu-ray drive is an engineering masterpiece that integrates disc rotation, pickup head translation, and three lasers in a compact and portable format. Here we integrate a blood-coated image sensor with a modified Blu-ray drive for high-throughput cytometric analysis of various bio-specimens. In this device, samples are mounted on the rotating Blu-ray disc and illuminated by the built-in lasers from the pickup head. The resulting coherent diffraction patterns are then recorded by the blood-coated image sensor. The rich spatial features of the blood-cell monolayer help down-modulate the object information for sensor detection, thus forming a high-resolution computational bio-lens with a theoretically unlimited field of view. With the acquired data, we develop a lensless coherent diffraction imaging modality termed rotational ptychography for image reconstruction. We show that our device can resolve the 435 nm linewidth on the resolution target and has a field of view only limited by the size of the Blu-ray disc. To demonstrate its applications, we perform high-throughput urinalysis by locating disease-related calcium oxalate crystals over the entire microscope slide. We also quantify different types of cells on a blood smear with an acquisition speed of ~10,000 cells per second. For in vitro experiment, we monitor live bacterial cultures over the entire Petri dish with single-cell resolution. Using biological cells as a computational lens could enable new intriguing imaging devices for point-of-care diagnostics. Modifying a Blu-ray drive with the blood-coated sensor further allows the spread of high-throughput optical microscopy from well-equipped laboratories to citizen scientists worldwide.