'FlatScope' - Lens-Free, Super-Thin Microscope
Lenses are no longer necessary, according to Rice University engineers developing a fluorescent microscope as thin as a credit card. 'FlatScope' eliminates the tradeoff that hinders traditional microscopes in which arrays of lenses can either gather less light from a large field of view, or gather more light from a smaller field. In a paper published in Science Advances , the researchers say FlatScope could be used as an implantable endoscope, a large-area imager, or a flexible microscope.
Transcript
00:00:00 this is a lensless camera and we event lensless to remove the lens so that we can achieve such a small size here usually if you have a camera with lens like a rice the lens helps us to focus but it limits the size of the camera here by removing it we can make it this small but we have to compensate for the lens somehow so we are removing the lens completely from the system and replacing
00:00:26 it with in this case an amplitude mask which is basically we block some of the light and we allow some of the lights to come through directly to the sensor and what we see is some combination of those opening there's open and closed areas landing on the sensor and we use that to reconstruct the image and we can get a very small form-factor down to in the case of this device
00:00:48 less than 500 microns which is about five human hairs so it's a very very thin much smaller than the thinness of a credit card even and we anticipate being able to use this in medical application so what I think is most exciting about what we've done now is we've taken this idea of taking a three-dimensional camera shrinking it down to somebody very tiny and with that gives us some
00:01:10 advantages that you would not have if you are using a lens system and we discovered that with the flat cam we had a lot of advantages and we wanted to ask the question of if we could get some of those same advantages for imaging at the micro scale so can we make a flat microscope now there's a couple of reasons why we're interested in this one is that there's this trade-off and you
00:01:34 have a lens microscope between magnification and your field of view basically if you want to zoom in on a very small object you need a large magnification but when you do that you don't get to see very much of your sample now what we've done with this flat scope is shown that when you don't have a lens you don't have to make that trade-off so
00:01:54 you can see things that are very tiny but we can see them over a large area so this idea that we can see small things over large area means that we can image potentially lots of biological activity and that's very exciting for me and my lab where we study the brain so the dream is that we could take these flat microscopes I can see individual cells at the large areas and implant them into
00:02:16 the body perhaps into the brain and that would allow us to look at neural activity over these large areas and understand how the insoluble activity inside of the brain leads to things like paper [Music]