Ultrafast quantitative time-stretch imaging flow cytometry of phytoplankton

Biomedical Spectroscopy, Microscopy, and Imaging: 9720 - High-Speed Biomedical Imaging and Spectroscopy: Toward Big Data Instrumentation and Management: Paper 9720-35Comprehensive quantification of phytoplankton abundance, sizes and other parameters, e.g. biomasses, has been an important, yet daunting task in aquatic sciences and biofuel research. It is primarily because of the lack of effective tool to image and thus accurately profile individual microalgae in a large population. The phytoplankton species are highly diversified and heterogeneous in terms of their sizes and the richness in morphological complexity. This fact makes time-stretch imaging, a new ultrafast real-time optical imaging technology, particularly suitable for ultralarge-scale taxonomic classification of phytoplankton together with quantitative image recognition and analysis. We here demonstrate quantitative imaging flow cytometry of single phytoplankton based on quantitative asymmetric-detection time-stretch optical microscopy (Q-ATOM) – a new time-stretch imaging modality for label-free quantitative phase imaging without interferometric implementations. Sharing the similar concept of Schlieren imaging, Q-ATOM accesses multiple phase-gradient contrasts of each single phytoplankton, from which the quantitative phase profile is computed. We employ such system to capture, at an imaging line-scan rate of 11.6 MHz, high-resolution images of two phytoplankton populations (scenedesmus and chlamydomonas) in ultrafast microfluidic flow (3 m/s). We further perform quantitative taxonomic screening analysis enabled by this technique. More importantly, the system can also generate quantitative phase images of single phytoplankton. This is especially useful for label-free quantification of biomasses (e.g. lipid droplets) of the particular species of interest – an important task adopted in biofuel applications. Combining machine learning for automated classification, Q-ATOM could be an attractive platform for continuous and real-time ultralarge-scale single-phytoplankton analysis.The 2016 SPIE Photonics West Conference, San Francisco, CA., 13-18 February 2016. In Conference Proceedings, 2016, v. 9720, paper no. 9720-3

All-passive pixel super-resolution of time-stretch imaging

Based on image encoding in a serial-temporal format, optical time-stretch imaging entails a stringent requirement of state-of-the- art fast data acquisition unit in order to preserve high image resolution at an ultrahigh frame rate --- hampering the widespread utilities of such technology. Here, we propose a pixel super-resolution (pixel-SR) technique tailored for time-stretch imaging that preserves pixel resolution at a relaxed sampling rate. It harnesses the subpixel shifts between image frames inherently introduced by asynchronous digital sampling of the continuous time-stretch imaging process. Precise pixel registration is thus accomplished without any active opto-mechanical subpixel-shift control or other additional hardware. Here, we present the experimental pixel-SR image reconstruction pipeline that restores high-resolution time-stretch images of microparticles and biological cells (phytoplankton) at a relaxed sampling rate (approx. 2--5 GSa/s) --- more than four times lower than the originally required readout rate (20 GSa/s) --- is thus effective for high-throughput label-free, morphology-based cellular classification down to single-cell precision. Upon integration with the high-throughput image processing technology, this pixel-SR time- stretch imaging technique represents a cost-effective and practical solution for large scale cell-based phenotypic screening in biomedical diagnosis and machine vision for quality control in manufacturing.Comment: 17 pages, 8 figure

Optical time-stretch imaging flow cytometry of phytoplankton

We demonstrate high-throughput single-microorganism (phytoplankton) analysis based on ultrafast imaging flow cytometry enabled by optical time-stretch at a throughput orders-of-magnitude faster than the existing techniques employed for marine or biofuel research. © 2015 IEEE.Link_to_subscribed_fulltex