Accelerated cell imaging and classification on FPGAs for quantitative-phase asymmetric-detection time-stretch optical microscopy

With the fundamental trade-off between speed and sensitivity, existing quantitative phase imaging (QPI) systems for diagnostics and cell classification are often limited to batch processing only small amount of offline data. While quantitative asymmetric-detection time-stretch optical microscopy (Q-ATOM) offers a unique optical platform for ultrafast and high-sensitivity quantitative phase cellular imaging, performing the computationally demanding backend QPI phase retrieval and image classification in real-time remains a major technical challenge. In this paper, we propose an optimized architecture for QPI on FPGA and compare its performance against CPU and GPU implementations in terms of speed and power efficiency. Results show that our implementation on single FPGA card demonstrates a speedup of 9.4 times over an optimized C implementation running on a 6-core CPU, and 3.47 times over the GPU implementation. It is also 24.19 and 4.88 times more power-efficient than the CPU and GPU implementation respectively. Throughput increase linearly when four FPGA cards are used to further improve the performance. We also demonstrate an increased classification accuracy when phase images instead of single-angle ATOM images are used. Overall, one FPGA card is able to process and categorize 2497 cellular images per second, making it suitable for real-time single-cell analysis applications.