High-throughput Cellular Imaging with High-Speed Asymmetric-Detection Time-Stretch Optical Microscopy under FPGA Platform

Asymmetric-Detection Time-Stretch Optical Microscopy (ATOM) is a recently emerged technology that provides ultra-fast cell imaging with a frame rate up to MHz - orders-of-magnitude higher than any classical imaging systems. However, existing measuring instruments are unable to fully exploit the capability of ATOM. For example, the volume of imaging data-set of ATOM quickly increases beyond the capacity of available onboard buffer of a modern high-speed oscilloscope. This paper presents an open source, FPGA-based solution which serves as a dual role of collecting low-level signals from ATOM frontend as well as processing and transferring data to backing store. Optical signals are sampled by a high-speed analog-to-digital converter and the resulting values are collected by an FPGA. The quantized values received are then further processed and divided into four segments for subsequent data transfer with 1 0 Gbit Ethernet. Four computing units are attached to these channels with direct connection in order to reliably receive the data for post-processing. Experiments show that, with decent quality images for single-cell analysis, the proposed system can store 1 0 x more dataset than existing high-end oscilloscope. With 8 x decrease in equipment cost, the proposed FPGA-based system will definitely be beneficial for many bioimaging applications with ATOM technology such as rare cancer cell imaging and identification.