An affordable, handheld multimodal microscopic system with onboard cell morphology and counting features on a mobile device

Microscopes, bright-field (BF) and fluorescence microscopes, in particular, are ubiquitous for clinical diagnostics, cellular and microbiological investigations and in research laboratories. However, the size, cost, fragility and need for skilled personnel to operate these tools restrict their use in resource-limited settings. As an alternative platform, herein, we report a flexible multimodal imaging system that operates in BF and fluorescence modes using a smartphone. Our device utilizes the inbuilt primary camera of phones, and with the aid of easily available optical components, the designed platform is transformed into a high-throughput microscopic device that performs on par with that of a laboratory-grade microscope. The designed platform operates at three different optical magnifications and yields a lateral resolution of 1.21 μm over an acceptable field-of-view (FoV) of diameter ∼4530 μm. The versatility of the device has been demonstrated through imaging of standard microbeads and human blood samples both in BF and fluorescence modes of imaging. Furthermore, the designed imaging platform is equipped with an on-board cell recognition feature which has been obtained through developing a smartphone application for automatic cell counting with high precision. A simple yet effective, handheld and flexible bright-field and fluorescence microscopic platform on a smartphone with varying optical magnifications is reported for morphological analysis and onboard cell counting features.