Design, development, and performance comparison of wide field lensless and lens-based optical systems for point-of-care biological applications

Lensless biological imaging systems are an emerging alternative to conventional microscopic systems because they enable a wide field of view imaging. While most microscopic systems sacrifice the field of view for magnification, lensless systems have taken advantage of small imaging pixel size, projection, digital magnification, and post-processing to compensate for diffracted images. A new lens-based system is designed to have the exact same wide field of view as that of a basic lensless setup. A new compound lens system design is utilized to achieve an explicit aim to have the same fields of view as the lensless setup. Then the characteristics of these two optical imaging setups (lensless and lens-based setups) are compared at this level of complexity to see what the minimal systems principles are needed to achieve the biological imaging goals for simplified and less expensive future designs. For both imaging systems, images of biological entities are recorded with the help of the same CMOS imaging device and computer software. The main contribution of this work is an exhaustive comparison between the performance characteristics of both systems using optical standards and biological images.