Talebian Shahrzad, Javanmard Mehdi
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Rutgers University, New Jersey, USA.
Talanta. 2021 Jun 1;228:122244. doi: 10.1016/j.talanta.2021.122244. Epub 2021 Feb 26.
The majority of existing advanced automated cell counter instruments used in laboratory settings are complex, expensive, and bulky. As a result, applications of these instruments have been limited to such laboratories. Meanwhile, in many rural areas and developing countries, clinical laboratories equipped with optical microscopy, hematology analyzers or commercial automated particle counters may not be readily accessible to everyone. However, in the same regions, the number of cell-phone users are rapidly increasing, suggesting a need to develop an easy-to-use and portable smart-phone based cell counting technology that can be leveraged in resource-limited areas. To this end, we present an automated, portable and easy-to-use smartphone-based particle counting platform designed to detect particles in a sample solution. This novel pump-less, flow-based portable technology utilizes a small lens attached to a smartphone camera to magnify particles passing through a microfluidic channel, and record a video using a smartphone camera application. The captured video is transmitted to a local computer to be processed through a custom-developed algorithm to perform particle counting. Using a total of 30 different test samples, we have shown that our technology can detect and count polystyrene beads as small as 16.2 μm with ~100% accuracy. We evaluated the performance of our new technology using different size particles and showed that the results are comparable to the tedious, manual-microscope based counting method. Although, we benchmark the performance of the platform using polystyrene beads, we emphasize the wide applicability of the platform to a wide range of biological, biomedical, and industrial applications.
实验室环境中使用的大多数现有先进自动细胞计数仪器都很复杂、昂贵且体积庞大。因此，这些仪器的应用仅限于此类实验室。与此同时，在许多农村地区和发展中国家，配备光学显微镜、血液分析仪或商用自动颗粒计数器的临床实验室并非人人都能轻易使用。然而，在同一地区，手机用户数量正在迅速增加，这表明需要开发一种易于使用且便于携带的基于智能手机的细胞计数技术，以便在资源有限的地区使用。为此，我们展示了一种基于智能手机的自动化、便携式且易于使用的颗粒计数平台，旨在检测样品溶液中的颗粒。这种新颖的无泵、基于流动的便携式技术利用附着在智能手机相机上的小镜头放大通过微流控通道的颗粒，并使用智能手机相机应用程序录制视频。捕获的视频被传输到本地计算机，通过定制开发的算法进行处理以进行颗粒计数。我们使用总共30个不同的测试样品表明，我们的技术能够以约100%的准确率检测和计数小至16.2μm的聚苯乙烯珠。我们使用不同大小的颗粒评估了我们新技术的性能，结果表明该结果与基于繁琐的手动显微镜的计数方法相当。尽管我们使用聚苯乙烯珠对该平台的性能进行了基准测试，但我们强调该平台在广泛的生物、生物医学和工业应用中的广泛适用性。
