Muscope: A miniature on-chip lensless microscope

Abstract

In the past few decades, a significant amount of effort has been put into developing different lensless microscope designs. The existing lensless microscopes are capable of offering high resolution and wide field-of-view using super-resolution and computational techniques. But, the employment of macroscopic illumination system and unscalable opto-mechanical components limit their cost-effectiveness, scalability, mass production and on-chip integration. In this work, we report Muscope, an on-chip microscope, which fixes these issues. It extends a few mm in each dimension and comprises of an off-the-shelf electronic assembly. The futuristic microLED display chip is utilised as the light source. Each microLED on the chip functions as a microscopic light source whose position and brightness can be electronically controlled. To demonstrate Muscope, we imaged human blood smear and microbeads of diameter upto 1 m. We also provide a proof-of-concept of its suitability with super-resolution and field-of-view enhancement techniques, without additional hardware compulsions.