Ball lens-assisted smartphone microscopy with diffraction-limited resolution

Vasily N. Astratov; Boya Jin; Anton A. Erykalin; Alexey V. Maslov

doi:10.1117/12.2624450

24 May 2022 Ball lens-assisted smartphone microscopy with diffraction-limited resolution

Vasily N. Astratov, Boya Jin, Anton A. Erykalin, Alexey V. Maslov

Proceedings Volume 12152, Mesophotonics: Physics and Systems at Mesoscale; 1215206 (2022) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2624450
Event: SPIE Photonics Europe, 2022, Strasbourg, France

Abstract

It is shown that the resolution of portable and lightweight smartphone-based microscopy can be increased up to the diffraction limit by using imaging through ball lenses with refractive index sufficiently close to n=2 under contact conditions with nanoplasmonic and biomedical samples. It is demonstrated that the millimeter-scale ball lenses made from LASFN35 glass with n=2.02 at λ = 600 nm allow achieving extraordinarily high image magnification up to 50u. Under these conditions, it is possible to move away from the conventional resolution limitations of cellphone microscopy determined by the pixilation of the images and to reach the diffraction-limited resolution ~600 nm. It is shown that the dispersion of n allows tuning of magnification in a very broad range. The magnification values are explained by the exact numerical solution of the Maxwell equations and a good agreement with the experiment is demonstrated. We performed smartphone imaging of different biomedical samples such as melanoma and human aorta and demonstrated that the quality of imaging is comparable to that in conventional microscopy with the 10× objectives. The in-principle possibility is suggested of melanoma diagnostics based on observation of distribution of lymphocyte cells by application of cellphone microscope to the patient’s skin without a need to make histological samples.

Conference Presentation

Citation Download Citation

Vasily N. Astratov, Boya Jin, Anton A. Erykalin, and Alexey V. Maslov "Ball lens-assisted smartphone microscopy with diffraction-limited resolution", Proc. SPIE 12152, Mesophotonics: Physics and Systems at Mesoscale, 1215206 (24 May 2022); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2624450

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