Smartphone-based Optical Sectioning (SOS) Microscopy with A Telecentric Design for Fluorescence Imaging

TL;DR

This paper introduces a low-cost, smartphone-based optical sectioning microscope utilizing a telecentric design and HiLo technique, enabling high-contrast fluorescence imaging suitable for resource-limited biomedical research.

Contribution

It presents the first smartphone-based HiLo optical sectioning microscopy system with a telecentric design and low-cost components, enhancing accessibility for biomedical imaging.

Findings

Achieved 571.5 μm telecentric scanning range

Attained 11.7 μm axial resolution

Successfully imaged fluorescent polystyrene beads with optical sectioning

Abstract

We proposed a Smartphone-based Optical Sectioning (SOS) microscope based on the HiLo technique, with a single smartphone replacing a high-cost illumination source and a camera sensor.We built our SOS with off-the-shelf optical mechanical cage systems with 3D-printed adapters to integrate the smartphone with the SOS main body seamlessly.The liquid light guide can be integrated with the adapter, guiding the smartphone LED light to the digital mirror device with neglectable loss.We used an electrically tunable lens (ETL) instead of a mechanical translation stage to realize low-cost axial scanning. The ETL was conjugated to the objective lens back pupil plane (BPP) to construct a telecentric design by a 4f configuration. This can exempt images of different layers from the variation in magnification. SOS has a 571.5 {\mu}m telecentric scanning range and an 11.7 {\mu}m axial resolution. The broadband smartphone LED torch can effectively excite fluorescent polystyrene (PS) beads. We successfully used SOS for high contrast fluorescent PS beads imaging with different wavelengths and optical sectioning imaging of accumulated fluorescent PS beads. To our knowledge, the proposed SOS is the first smartphone-based HiLo optical sectioning microscopy. It is a powerful, low-cost tool for biomedical research in resource-limited areas.