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Lensless Fluorescent Microscopy on a Chip

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Maskless and on-chip LED-array microscope with spatially-varying angle calibration for centimeter-scale phase

Sibi Chakravarthy Shanmugavel¹, Vindya Senanayake², Donghwa Suh²

¹Chandra Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA.

Biorxiv : the Preprint Server for Biology

|September 18, 2025

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

This study introduces a mask-free computational method for large field-of-view (FOV) phase imaging using LED arrays. It overcomes twin-image ambiguity and varying illumination angles for cost-effective, high-resolution imaging of biological tissues.

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Area of Science:

Optics
Biomedical Imaging
Computational Imaging

Background:

LED-array-based angled illumination enables cost-effective, large field-of-view (FOV) phase imaging.
Challenges include twin-image ambiguity degrading phase reconstruction and spatially varying illumination angles affecting large FOV accuracy.
Existing mask-based solutions increase system complexity.

Purpose of the Study:

To develop a computational framework for mask-free on-chip phase imaging.
To achieve adaptive calibration of spatially-varying LED illumination angles.
To enable high-quality, large-FOV phase imaging of biological samples.

Main Methods:

Dividing the sensor FOV into subregions with approximated planar LED illumination.
Initializing LED illumination angles geometrically and refining them during phase retrieval.
Utilizing a soft optical transparency prior for phase reconstruction within each subregion.
Merging reconstructed phase maps for a complete large-FOV image.

Main Results:

Demonstrated centimeter-scale on-chip phase imaging (up to 2.7 × 1.7 cm²).
Achieved micron-level resolution across various biological tissue sections.
Successfully performed mask-free phase imaging and adaptive illumination angle calibration.

Conclusions:

The computational framework effectively addresses twin-image ambiguity and illumination angle variations.
Enables cost-effective, high-resolution, large-FOV phase imaging without complex optical masks.
Presents a significant advancement for on-chip phase imaging of biological samples.