Miniaturized multi-contrast quantitative phase imaging microscope

We present a miniaturized microscopic imaging system to achieve multi-contrast label-free imaging. In our imaging system, a highly integrated optical system using a miniaturization lens with fixed focal length replaces the complex optical path of traditional microscope systems, significantly reducing the size of the microscope to 14*16.5*20 cm3 . A programmable full-color light emitting diode (LED), which is controlled by independently designed operating software, is used to illuminate the sample in different illumination patterns. In addition, we developed a QT-based operating software to implement the synchronous control of the hardware system to achieve various label-free imaging approaches, including bright field, dark field, rainbow dark field, Rheinberg, differential phase contrast, and quantitative phase imaging. All the microscopic imaging approaches and system parameters can be controlled by the software without any hardware modification. In addition, some functions of the cell analysis are also added to our system, which can realize cell counter, 3D information measurement. We demonstrated our miniaturized system and its imaging results through experiments, which showed that our system is simple and fast to operate, providing more visual imaging results and high-resolution 3D information for samples. The experiment on living cell demonstrated that our miniaturized system can be built into an incubator for imaging and analysis of living cells in an environment suitable for cell growth.