Multimodal FACED imaging for large-scale single-cell morphological profiling

Free-space angular-chirp-enhanced delay (FACED) is an ultrafast laser-scanning technique that allows for high imaging speed at the scale orders of magnitude greater than the current technologies. However, this speed advantage has only been restricted to bright-field and fluorescence imaging—limiting the variety of image contents and hindering its applicability in image-based bioassay, which increasingly demands rich phenotypic readout at a large scale. Here, we present a new high-speed quantitative phase imaging (QPI) based on time-interleaved phase-gradient FACED image detection. We further integrate this system with a microfluidic flow cytometer platform that enables synchronized and co-registered single-cell QPI and fluorescence imaging at an imaging throughput of 77 000 cells/s with sub-cellular resolution. Combined with deep learning, this platform empowers comprehensive image-based profiling of single-cell biophysical phenotypes that can offer not only sufficient label-free power for cell-type classification but also cell-cycle phase tracking with high accuracy comparable to the gold-standard fluorescence method. This platform further enables correlative, compartment-specific single-cell analysis of the spatially resolved biophysical profiles at the throughput inaccessible with existing QPI methods. The high imaging throughput and content given by this multimodal FACED imaging system could open new opportunities in image-based single-cell analysis, especially systematic analysis that correlates the biophysical and biochemical information of cells, and provide new mechanistic insights into biophysical heterogeneities in many biological processes.