A dual-mode, image-enhanced, miniaturized microscopy system for incubator-compatible monitoring of live cells.

Imaging live cells under stable culture conditions is essential to investigate cell physiological activities and proliferation. To achieve this goal, typically, a specialized incubation chamber that creates desired culture conditions needs to be incorporated into a microscopy system to perform cell monitoring. However, such imaging systems are generally large and costly, hampering their wide applications. Recent advances in the field of miniaturized microscopy systems have enabled incubator cell monitoring, providing a hospitable environment for live cells. Although these systems are more cost-effective, they are usually limited in imaging modalities and spatial temporal resolution. Here, we present a dual-mode, image-enhanced, miniaturized microscopy system (termed MiniCube) for direct monitoring of live cells inside incubators. MiniCube enables both bright field imaging and fluorescence imaging with single-cell spatial resolution and sub-second temporal resolution. Moreover, this system can also perform cell monitoring inside the incubator with tunable time scales ranging from a few seconds to days. Meanwhile, automatic cell segmentation and image enhancement are realized by the proposed data analysis pipeline of this system, and the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of acquired data is significantly improved using a deep learning based image denoising algorithm. Image data can be acquired with 5 times lower light exposure while maintaining comparable SNR. The versatility of this miniaturized microscopy system lends itself to various applications in biology studies, providing a practical platform and method for studying live cell dynamics within the incubator.
Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare the following financial interests/personal relationships which may be considered as potential competing interests:Ning Hu reports a relationship with National Natural Science Foundation of China that includes: funding grants. Diming Zhang reports a relationship with Zhejiang Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China that includes: funding grants. Chunlian Qin reports a relationship with National Natural Science Foundation of China that includes: funding grants. Ning Hu reports a relationship with Hangzhou Agricultural Social Development Research Key Project that includes:. Chunlian Qin reports a relationship with China Postdoctoral Science Foundation Funded Project that includes: funding grants. If there are other authors, they declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
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