Light-Field Microscopy-Based Counting Of Particles Moving in a Microfluidic Volume

This paper presents a three-dimensional (3D) imaging flow cytometry (IFC) based on light-field microscopy (LFM) that is capable to capture 3D spatial information of an entire microfluidic volume by a single exposure. Our LFM 3D IFC uses a custom microlens array (MLA) that is fabricated with a low-cost method and achieves on-chip continuous 3D imaging of particles flowing in a microfluidic channel. Our counting algorithm uses a sequential intensity peak search to identify the locations of the individual particles, and it has a counting accuracy of ~92.6%. Compared with other 3D IFC, our device can achieve a higher throughput, and it avoids false counts due to particle occlusion.