On-site cell concentration and viability detections using smartphone based field-portable cell counter

摘要

We designed a smartphone based field-portable cell counter combining the smartphone microscope for bright-field image recording and the smartphone application for automatically cell recognition, counting and analysis. To our best knowledge, it is the first time that a smartphone based cell counter can distinguish and count both live and dead cells simultaneously. Compared to the results obtained by hemocytometer, commercial cell counter and flow cytometer, the proposed device was proved to detect cell concentration and viability accurately within the application range between 10(5) cells/mL and 10(7) cells/mL. Though multiple fields of view were measured to increase the sampling amount for error reduction, the whole operations including image recording and processing can still be finished rapidly. Moreover, the proposed device is cost-effective with small size of 170 mm x 113mm x 168mm containing a built-in power supply. Considering its advantages as high accuracy, fast speed, low cost, long battery life and compact configuration, it is believed the proposed device is a potential tool applied in on-site cell analysis. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.