Ultrafast Microfluidic Cellular Imaging by Optical Time Stretch

Abstract

There is an unmet need in biomedicine for measuring a multitude of parameters of individual cells (i.e., high content) in a large population ef ciently (i.e., high throughput). This is particularly driven by the emerging interest in bringing Big-Data analysis into this arena, encompassing pathology, drug discovery, rare cancer cell detection, emulsion microdroplet assays, to name a few. This momentum is particularly evident in recent advancements in ow cytometry. They include scaling of the number of measurable colors from the labeled cells and incorporation of imaging capability to access the morphological information of the cells. However, an unspoken predicament appears in the current technologies: higher content comes at the expense of lower throughput, and vice versa. For example, accessing additional spatial information of individual cells, imaging ow cytometers only achieve an imaging throughput ~1000 cells/s, orders of magnitude slower than the non- imaging ow cytometers. In this chapter, we introduce an entirely new imaging platform, namely optical time-stretch microscopy, for ultrahigh speed and high contrast label-free single-cell (in a ultrafast micro uidic ow up to 10 m/s) imaging and analysis with an ultra-fast imaging line-scan rate as high as tens of MHz. Based on this technique, not only morphological information of the individual cells can be obtained in an ultrafast manner, quantitative evaluation of cellular information (e.g., cell volume, mass, refractive index, stiffness, membrane tension) at nanometer scale based on the optical phase is also possible. The technology can also be integrated with conventional uorescence measurements widely adopted in the non-imaging ow cytometers. Therefore, these two combinatorial and complementary measurement capabilities in long run is an attractive platform for addressing the pressing need for expanding the “parameter space” in high-throughput single-cell analysis. This chapter provides the general guidelines of constructing the optical system for time stretch imaging, fabrication and design on the micro uidic chip for ultrafast uidic ow, as well as the image acquisition and processing.