A traditional light microscope can have a large field of view with poor resolution or a small field of view with good resolution but not both. To address that limitation, Guoan Zheng at the University of Connecticut and his colleagues developed a high-resolution computational biolens. They smeared a monolayer of blood cells on top of an image sensor and fixed the cells in place with alcohol. The blood-cell layer redirects light diffracted at a large angle by an object of interest to smaller angles that reach the image sensor. Previously inaccessible high-resolution details can then be acquired using the sensor’s pixel array underneath the blood-cell layer. The biolens’s field of view is limited only by the size of the silicon chip for the image sensor, which can be as large as 36 mm by 24 mm.
The microscope prototype shown here was built using a modified Blu-ray player, which makes...
