Bio-FlatScope, a Lensless Microscope, Can Take Pictures of Your Brain While You're Running
Building on the earlier FlatCam project, Bio-FlatScope captures seemingly-random noise, processing it into a clear microscope image.
A team of scientists at Rice University has developed a lens-free camera capable of capturing cellular-level images with 3D details, even through the skin of living creatures: Bio-FlatScope.
Designed for microscopic observations in the tissues of living animals, the Bio-FlatScope can capture details as small as cells, blood vessels, and fluorescent-tagged neurons — peering through the skin using a randomized phase mask where a traditional camera module would feature a lens.
"Being random allows the mask to be pretty diverse in gathering light from all directions," explains postdoc researcher Vivek Boominathan, one of four lead authors on the project. "And then we take the random input, which is called Perlin noise, and do some processing to get these high-contrast contours."
The team tested the sensor on plants, jellyfish-like hydra, and eventually a rodent running on a wheel — measuring fluorescent-tagged neurons in the animal's brain in real time and picking out blood vessels as small as 10 microns across.
"It was kind of an engineering challenge because it’s difficult to position the Bio-FlatScope at the correct position and keep it there," co-lead author Jimin Wu adds, of an experiment that saw the sensor attached to her lower lip. "But it showed us it could be a good tool for seeing signs of sepsis, because pre-sepsis changes the density of the vasculature. Cancer also alters the morphology of the microvasculature."
The project builds on FlatCam, a lens-free camera system unveiled in 2015 and prototyped using sensors obtained from Raspberry Pi Camera Modules. Like the Bio-FlatScope, the FlatCam captures data, which looks like noise but can be processed into a discernible image — and even have its focus point adjusted post-capture.
In 2018 FlatCam's successor, FlatScope, was unveiled, which co-author Richard Baraniuk described as "amping-up FlatCam so it can solve even bigger problems" by allowing it to act as a fluorescent microscope while simultaneously dropping the processing time per image from over an hour per image to 30 images per second.
The team's work has been published in the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering under open-access terms.