Miniature microscopy provides a transformative approach to observe objects and enable continuous monitoring with ultra-compact microscopes attached directly to specimens, facilitating parallel analysis. This innovation is particularly valuable for applications such as drug discovery using organ-on-a-chip devices, which require the assessment of numerous drug/sample pairs prior to clinical trials. Ultra-compact microscopes were previously limited to brightfield techniques, which prevented the use of powerful tools like fluorescent microscopy. In this work, we present a miniature microscope with integrated fluorescence measurement capabilities. This microscope consists of a custom chip with a 10 μm-diameter single-photon avalanche diode (SPAD) faced to a 640 × 480 InGaN/GaN 4 μm-pitch LED microdisplay. It operates in raster mode, activating individual LEDs to map specimens in 2D while measuring fluorescence light with the SPAD chip. Our results demonstrate its suitability for life sciences imaging. For example, we observed a muscle-ona-chip stained with Alexa Fluor 488 to study drug efficacy on sarcopenia. Furthermore, these microscopes exhibit superior speed compared to the previously reported ultra-compact brightfield microscopes, achieving a 240-fold increase in imaging rate by means of hardware controller integration on FPGA.
Nano-Illumination Microscopy (NIM) is a technique that provides compact microscopes but at the present time only setups with limited Field-of-View (FOV) have been presented. Existing NIM setups reconstruct the image by measuring the light intensity that passes through the specimen when switching after one another the light emitting diodes (LEDs) on an array. The resolution of NIM is related to the LEDs pitch, while the FOV to the total area covered by the array. The first prototypes were demonstrated with 10 μm-pitch GaN-based 8x8 LED arrays giving rise to 80x80 μm2 FOV. This work presents the first electronically-activated Scanning Transmission Optical Microscope (eSTOM) built with an Organic LED-on-silicon micro-display with 5 μm LEDs pitch, providing a FOV of 3.6 × 1.28 mm2 . It is combined with a CMOS optical sensor with no other optical or mechanical components. We demonstrate how downscaling of the OLED array by means of optical lenses allows to further reduce the size of the light sources to explore the technique in more detail. Here we show steps towards the utility of NIM as a practical, low-cost and compact microscopy technique for biophotonics and many other applications.
In this work we present a new microscope based on Nano-illumination microscopy (NIM), i.e., an innovative technique based on a 2D array of nano-Light-Emitting Diodes (LEDs) used to illuminate a sample. The key point of this method is that the pitch of the LED array fixes the spatial resolution. So, potentially, with LED pitches lower than the diffraction limit, super resolution could be achieved. While nanometer sized LEDs are not available yet, we present a prototype based on optical downscaling of a single 5µm lateral size LED. Extended Field-of-View (FOV) is obtained by mechanical movement with nanopositioners. Aspects of NIM microscopy such as its size, its flexibility in the sensing hardware or its potential for fluorescence, make it a perfect candidate to enhance emerging sensing applications in different fields, but especially life science (medical imaging, genomics, ...). We demonstrate the possibilities of the NIM technique with patterns as well as with biological samples.
This work presents a compact low-cost and straightforward shadow imaging microscopy technique based on spatially resolved nano-illumination instead of spatially resolved detection. Independently addressable nano-LEDs on a regular 2D array provide the resolution of the microscope by illuminating the sample in contact with the LED array and creating a shadow image in a photodetector located on the opposite side. The microscope prototype presented here is composed by a GaN chip with an 8x8 array of 5μm-LEDs with 10 μm pitch light sources and a commercial CMOS image sensor with integrated lens used as a light collector. We describe the microscope prototype and analyze the effect of the sensing area size on image reconstruction.
This work presents a first prototype for a new approach to microscopy: a system basing its resolving power on the light emitters instead of the sensors, without using lenses. This new approach builds on the possibility of making LEDs smaller than current technology sensors, offering a new approach to microscopy we plan on developing towards superresolution. The microscope consists on a SPAD based camera, a 8x8 LED array with 5x5 μm LEDs distributed with a pitch of 10 μm, and discrete driving electronics to control them. We present simulations of the system, as well as the first microscope prototype implementing the method, and the results obtained through it.
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