High throughput optical analysis and sorting of cells and particles in microuidic systems

摘要

Nowadays, high-speed video microscopy is used in many applications like microrheology or ow cytometryto measure mechanical properties of cells or to identify their type. Typically, high-speed cameras use bufferingto reach very high frame rates due to the limited bandwidth of the interface to a PC like Ethernet or USB.Additionally, analysis of large data is compute-intense and in many cases difficult to do online. We developeda system that consists of a high speed CMOS image sensor combined with a field programmable gate array(FPGA) and a pulsed LED illumination system. Due to an image transformation that is done on the FPGA, thedimensionality of the data is reduced without loss of important information. This leads to a significant reductionof the amount of data as well as to noise reduction as a side effect. Furthermore, we developed a modularanalysis toolkit that can be used to do the whole analysis directly on the same FPGA online so that bufferingis not required and measurements can run continuously on high frame rates. Hence, we can analyze a largetotal number of objects at very high throughput rates in microuidic devices. We present the analysis of dilutedwhole blood in a microuidic system with our device as well as a sorting application that uses multiple regionsof interest that are observed simultaneously so that particles can be analyzed before and after a manipulationor gate.