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.
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