A concept of a new type of biological morphometry for the cell- and tissue- organization levels has been developed

A concept of a new type of biological morphometry for the cell- or/and tissue- organization levels has been developed, which makes it possible to visualize not an optically detectable morphology (habitus), but the patterns of its physical response to the external stimuli / field recorded by a chip on a CMOS / CCD array, or the patterns of its own non-optical characteristics (for example, the distribution of magnetic features for immunomagnetic assay on a chip or radioisotope distribution in radioautography on a chip), forming a compartmentalized pool of target substances or labels, characterized by a physical properties — a descriptors, the contours of which are visualized by the lensless microscope due to the multilevel signal conversion technique.

Using multilevel signal conversion techniques in multilayer sandwich converters, one can achieve not only mapping of the individual characteristics / descriptors, but also establish colocalization of these descriptors / characteristics over the sample area or in the microfluidic channels, that is, to obtain a correlation multiphysical map of the sample properties.

Using the film converters of various physical signals and sample properties into an optical signal in various spectral ranges, on the chips with RGB spectrozonal channels (with Bayer mosaic filters or their analogs with other spectrocolorimetric characteristics of the mosaic; or with the unified pixels capable of capturing information from all channels, in the case of APCS sensors; or with multilayer implementation of the spectrozonal color separation into the colocalized channels, as in the FOVEON X3 sensors), it is possible to colocalize at least three sample parameters on a chip if each of these parameters is converted into an optical signal that strictly corresponds to the parameters of the chromatic coordinates of a filter (or a photodiode layer of different depths in the case of X3, National Semiconductor; in the latter case, one-to-one colocalization mapping can be established, in which all the parameters are fixed at each point, and pixels or «sensels» of different physical descriptors are superimposed, which is unattainable in the case of Bayer mosaic filters and their analogues).

Being not just an image, but a time-resolved distribution map of the certain sample properties converted into an optical signal, the sample registration file itself is a file containing metrological information about all descriptors characterizing the sample with position-sensitivity. For each pixel of the image, a descriptor can be determined from the codes (image parameters) for a given conversion of a non-optical signal into an optical one, characterizing a compartmentalized sample.

Gradov O.V. (2016). Multiparametric lab-on-a-chip for biochemical and physico-chemical measurements with reference to the coordinates of the mapped sample. In Proc. Conference and Exhibition «Scientific Instrumentation — current state and prospects», p. 183–185 (in Russian).

Gradov O.V., Jablokov A.G. (2016). Novel morphometrics-on-a-chip: CCD- or CMOS-lab-on-achip based on discrete converters of different physical and chemical parameters of histological samples into the optical signals with positional sensitivity for morphometry of non-optical patterns. Journal of Biomedical Technologies, (2):1–29.

New sources (upd.: Sept. 2024):

Gradov, O. (2024). Multispectral lens-less microscopes and optofluidic chip readers with discrete convertors of chemical and non-optical physical signals into spectrozonal optical ones as novel instruments for medical ecology, biodiagnostics, and material quality control. Proceedings of SPIE — The International Society for Optical Engineering, 13279:1327920. DOI: 10.1117/12.3041309