Spatial- and Fourier-domain ptychography for high-throughput bio-imaging

First envisioned for determining crystalline structures, ptychography has become a useful imaging tool for microscopists. However, ptychography remains underused by biomedical researchers

due to its limited resolution and throughput in the visible light regime. Recent developments of spatial- and Fourier-domain ptychography have successfully addressed these issues and now

offer the potential for high-resolution, high-throughput optical imaging with minimal hardware modifications to existing microscopy setups, often providing an excellent trade-off between

resolution and field of view inherent to conventional imaging systems, giving biomedical researchers the best of both worlds. Here, we provide extensive information to enable the

implementation of ptychography by biomedical researchers in the visible light regime. We first discuss the intrinsic connections between spatial-domain coded ptychography and Fourier

ptychography. A step-by-step guide then provides the user instructions for developing both systems with practical examples. In the spatial-domain implementation, we explain how a

large-scale, high-performance blood-cell lens can be made at negligible expense. In the Fourier-domain implementation, we explain how adding a low-cost light source to a regular microscope

can improve the resolution beyond the limit of the objective lens. The turnkey operation of these setups is suitable for use by professional research laboratories, as well as citizen

scientists. Users with basic experience in optics and programming can build the setups within a week. The do-it-yourself nature of the setups also allows these procedures to be implemented

in laboratory courses related to Fourier optics, biomedical instrumentation, digital image processing, robotics and capstone projects.

The main data supporting this study are available within the article, Supplementary Data and the primary supporting study10,11,14. Experimental datasets for both setups in this study are

available in Zenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7492626.

All related MATLAB and Arduino code is provided in Supplementary Software. Additional code for testing experimental datasets is available in Zenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7492626.

We thank Z. Bian and A. Pirhanov for their assistance in sample preparation. This work was partially supported by the UConn SPARK grant, UConn Research Excellence Program, National Science

Foundation award 2012140 and National Institute of Health award U01-NS113873. P.S. also acknowledges the support of the Thermo Fisher Scientific Fellowship.

These authors contributed equally: Shaowei Jiang, Pengming Song, Tianbo Wang.

Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Connecticut, Storrs, USA

Shaowei Jiang, Pengming Song, Tianbo Wang, Liming Yang, Ruihai Wang, Chengfei Guo, Bin Feng & Guoan Zheng

Hangzhou Institute of Technology, Xidian University, Hangzhou, China

Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK

Diamond Light Source, Harwell Science and Innovation Campus, Chilton, UK

G.Z. conceived the project. S.J., P.S. and G.Z. designed the pipeline. S.J., P.S., T.W. and G.Z. developed the prototype systems and prepared the display items. S.J., P.S., T.W. and L.Y.

developed the data acquisition and processing pipelines for the protocol. T.W. and C.G. prepared all SolidWorks design files for the protocols. All authors contributed to the writing of the

manuscript.

G.Z. is a named inventor on the following patents related to Fourier ptychography (US Patent, nos. 9,817,224, 9,864,184, 9,497,379) and coded ptychography (US Patent, no. 11,487,099).

Nature Protocols thanks Zhengjun Liu, Fucai Zhang and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Zheng, G. et al. Nat. Photonics 7, 739-745 (2013): https://doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2013.187

Jiang, S. et al. ACS Photonics 8, 3261-3271 (2021): https://doi.org/10.1021/acsphotonics.1c01085

Jiang, S. et al. Biosens. Bioelectron. 196, 113699 (2022): https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bios.2021.113699

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