ng for years.
Ozcan, a researcher at the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA, makes the analogy that a traditional optical microscope is like a huge set of pipes delivering content, in the form of images, to the user. Over years of development, bottlenecks occur that impede further improvement. Even if one part of the system that is, one bottleneck is improved, other bottlenecks keep that improvement from being fully realized. Not so with the lens-free system, according to Ozcan.
"Lens-free imaging removes the pipes altogether by utilizing an entirely new design," he said.
The system takes advantage of the fact that organic structures, such as cells, are partially transparent. So by shining a light on a sample of cells, the shadows created reveal not only the cells' outlines but details about their sub-cellular structures as well.
"These details can be captured and analyzed if the shadow is directed onto a digital sensor array," Isikman said. "The end result of this process is an image taken without using a lens."
Ozcan envisions this lens-free imaging system as one component in a lab-on-a-chip platform. It could potentially fit beneath a microfluidic chip, a tool for the precise control and manipulation of sub-millimeter biological samples and fluids, and the two tools would operate in tandem, with the microfluidic chip depositing and subsequently removing a sample from the lens-free imager in an automated, or high-throughput, process.
The platform's 3-D images are created by rotating the light source to illuminate the samples from multiple angles. These multiple angles also allow the system to utilize tomography, a powerful imaging technique. Through the use of tomography, the system is able to produce 3-D images without sacrificing resolution.
"The field of view of lens-based microscopes is limited because the lens focuses on a narrow area of a sample," Bishara said. "A lens-fre
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| Contact: Mike Rodewald mrodewald@cnsi.ucla.edu 310-267-5883 University of California - Los Angeles Source:Eurekalert |
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