Lensfree Diffraction Reconstruction Approach Enables Early Detection of Cancer In Vitro Based on Molecular Diagnosis

Before there are any megascopic cancer clinical symptoms, molecular diagnosis is the main method for detecting cancer-associated gene and tumor marker. The existing detection facilities are all expensive, complicated to operate, and time-consuming, thereby making them difficult to popularize and benefit humans. In this study, we proposed a high-throughput and cost-effective approach, which enables accurate detection of extremely rare cancer cells based on molecular diagnosis of target tumor marker and a lensfree diffraction imaging platform. This approach achieves high-speed and high-quality reconstruction of huge images, which well solves the problem that precise recognition is almost impossible utilizing raw image because of significant pattern magnification and serious overlaps. Furthermore, the cells which are labeled with immune microbeads can be screened using the determined covered pixel sets, which are extracted in different focus reconstruction planes. The recognition strategy is implemented based on set intersection. With this method, the target cancer cells can be rapidly and accurately screened in a large number of benign cell samples. Besides, the detection equipment is cost-effective and easy to operate and popularize. It is expected to be widely used as a diagnostic tool for early detection of cancer.