
Microscopy without lenses - sohkamyung
http://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/PT.3.3693
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trapperkeeper74
Cool.

The Stanford paper microscopes are the cheap, analog alternative that use just
a glass bead. For electronics, it makes sense to eliminate lenses and use
physics to get a simpler microscope.

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c517402
IIRC when Intel was in the business of building educational add ons to
desktops, they produced some microscopes something like these.

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jszymborski
where can I buy one ;)

Seriously though, this would be great for getting microscopes in tightly-
integrated platforms.

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marcosdumay
The first three methods shouldn't be very expensive. There's no special
purpose components, no moving parts. As soon as patents expire you will
probably be able to buy one at the corner store.

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iheartmemcache
The size of a red blood cell is ~100 um. The size of a nucleus of a cell is
~6um in a mammal (so says wikipedia at least, I know less than a 9th grader
re: biology). You can get that resolution with < 10k worth of name-brand
optics gear (Zeiss, Nikkor JP, whatever) off eBay.

Pair that to a x,y stepper and some Python OpenCV script and you have a ready
to go "cell counter", which this paper espouses as one of its uses. Not only
that but they only get 20nm with shadow imaging techniques which (I'd
imagine[2])are inherently awful for actual examination of features.

Here's[3] a paper that uses wet-methods (i.e. good for biology, where you can
add florescence/dyes/stains to your culture; not nearly good enough for modern
chip fabrication) that gets you down to the 20nm range. And at that point your
lab already has a microscope to hit those lengths.

Basically this lowers the price of this use-case: "oh at t(0) we have 30
blurry units we can sorta-kinda safely assume as eukaryotic; t(1hr) = 600
blurry features". I can see this being a market opportunity for having in-
house cancer biopsy diagnostics.

From a research point of view, you're doing at the lower level (protein
folding, crystallography, whatever), you're already equipped with the proper
mass-specs/NMR/SEMs/TEMs you picked up from Waters or Agilent at half a
million. I mean that's got the potential to save a lot of lives, which is
awesome, but I probably sound disappointed because I was really hoping for an
actual advancement in lens-less microscopy.

\--

[1] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffraction-limited_system ~200 nm under ideal
conditions, no pedantry please on apertures or practical things like
chromatic/spherical abberation issues, etc. I realize these limits exist,
we're just talking orders of rough orders of magnitude. [2] Not in the field,
just remarking based on conversations with people who have had to setup labs
at universities with limited NIH/NSF budgets. [3]
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2645564/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2645564/)
There are a boatload of other papers out there, but this is the one I had off
hand.

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dekhn
Building a science grade microscope that can be used to produce research-grade
results is not a trivial problem. Sure you can strap a few lenses and steppers
to a frame and make a microscope but that's a very long distance from being
able to produce quantitative results of other scientists care about.

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iheartmemcache
I think you misunderstood me when I said "name-brand". I don't mean some 30
dollar microscope with $20 glass lapped with 2 passes of alumina 35 micron by
a 12 year old in a Chinese sweatshop. Those brands I mentioned were (and
apparently still are) more than good enough to get you into industry primer
publications. This[1] is literally a random paper I picked off of _Nature
Medicine_. I intentionally chose the first DOI from _Nature Medicine_ I saw to
get it as 'random' as possible. (Nikkor is the trademark Nikon used to use to
indicate their high-end domestically manufactured equipment.)

Hmm, Nikon, check. Agilent, check. Zeiss, check. Hell, everything in that
paper, from the Sigma-Aldrich sourced chemicals to the BioGen PCR sequencer is
100% bog standard. Go pick up this months copy of any journal of medicine
(hard medicine, not like, psychiatry -- JAMA, NE Journal of Medicine, Cell,
whatever) and see what hit-rate you have with those 5 brands. "Research
quality science equipment" is bog standard.

In fact, I was curious to see what equipment the CRISPR-Cas9 guys were using,
because I mean cleaving nt's is about as low-level as anyone with an MD/PhD is
going to get. (It also meets your "research-grade" criteria, cause, you know,
its _CRISPR-CAS9_.)[2] Same brands, more sensitive equipment, still pretty bog
standard. Again, semi-conductor equipment from the mid 2000s still has it beat
for requirements re: sterile conditions for SiO seed -> ingot growth, re:
resolution by an order of magnitude (at least) for making chip masks, re:
chemical purity when CVD'ing your poly/metals, and for resolution re:
SEM/FIB'ing for inspecting your wafers.

[1] [https://i.imgur.com/IC56Nxj.png](https://i.imgur.com/IC56Nxj.png) [2]
[https://i.imgur.com/EAQo77W.png](https://i.imgur.com/EAQo77W.png)

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dekhn
you're talking $50-100K of investment to buy that Nikon scope.

