A Real-Time Coprime Line Scan Super-Resolution System for Ultra-Fast Microscopy

Area of Science:

• Biomedical Optics
• Microscopy Technology
• Image Processing

Background:

• Ultra-fast microscopy faces a trade-off between imaging throughput and resolution.
• Real-time applications like cell sorting demand ultra-low imaging latency for single-cell decision-making.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a real-time, low-latency hardware super-resolution system for ultra-fast time-stretch microscopy.
• To overcome the throughput-resolution trade-off in high-speed cell imaging.

Main Methods:

• Utilized a novel coprime line scan sampling scheme with a shifted sampling grid.
• Implemented a fully pipelined Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA)-based system for real-time reconstruction.
• Employed an analog-to-digital converter tuned for super-resolution image reconstruction.

Main Results:

• Achieved an imaging latency of 0.29 microseconds.
• Reached a pixel-stream throughput of 4.123 giga pixels per second.
• Enabled an imaging throughput of approximately 120,000 cells per second.

Conclusions:

• The developed system successfully enables super-resolution imaging with minimal latency.
• The coprime line scan sampling scheme is parametrizable and applicable to various line scan imaging systems.
• This technology facilitates rapid, high-resolution analysis for applications like cell sorting.