Cost-effective approaches for high-resolution bioimaging by time-stretched confocal microscopy at 1um

Terence T. W. Wong; Yi Qiu; Andy K. S. Lau; JingJiang Xu; Antony C. S. Chan; Kenneth K. Y. Wong; Kevin K. Tsia

doi:10.1117/12.999833

11 December 2012 Cost-effective approaches for high-resolution bioimaging by time-stretched confocal microscopy at 1μm

Terence T. W. Wong, Yi Qiu, Andy K. S. Lau, JingJiang Xu, Antony C. S. Chan, Kenneth K. Y. Wong, Kevin K. Tsia

Proceedings Volume 8553, Optics in Health Care and Biomedical Optics V; 85531P (2012) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.999833
Event: Photonics Asia, 2012, Beijing, China

Abstract

Optical imaging based on time-stretch process has recently been proven as a powerful tool for delivering ultra-high frame rate (< 1MHz) which is not achievable by the conventional image sensors. Together with the capability of optical image amplification for overcoming the trade-off between detection sensitivity and speed, this new imaging modality is particularly valuable in high-throughput biomedical diagnostic practice, e.g. imaging flow cytometry. The ultra-high frame rate in time-stretch imaging is attained by two key enabling elements: dispersive fiber providing the time-stretch process via group-velocity-dispersion (GVD), and electronic digitizer. It is well-known that many biophotonic applications favor the spectral window of ~1μm. However, reasonably high GVD (< 0.1 ns/nm) in this range can only be achieved by using specialty single-mode fiber (SMF) at 1μm. Moreover, the ultrafast detection has to rely on the state-of- the-art digitizer with significantly wide-bandwidth and high sampling rate (e.g. <10 GHz, <40 GS/s). These stringent requirements imply the prohibitively high-cost of the system and hinder its practical use in biomedical diagnostics. We here demonstrate two cost-effective approaches for realizing time-stretch confocal microscopy at 1μm: (i) using the standard telecommunication SMF (e.g. SMF28) to act as a few-mode fiber (FMF) at 1μm for the time-stretch process, and (ii) implementing the pixel super-resolution (SR) algorithm to restore the high-resolution (HR) image when using a lower-bandwidth digitizer. By using a FMF (with a GVD of ~ 0.15ns/nm) and a modified pixel-SR algorithm, we can achieve time-stretch confocal microscopy at 1μm with cellular resolution (~ 3μm) at a frame rate 1 MHz.

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Terence T. W. Wong, Yi Qiu, Andy K. S. Lau, JingJiang Xu, Antony C. S. Chan, Kenneth K. Y. Wong, and Kevin K. Tsia "Cost-effective approaches for high-resolution bioimaging by time-stretched confocal microscopy at 1μm", Proc. SPIE 8553, Optics in Health Care and Biomedical Optics V, 85531P (11 December 2012); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.999833

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