Integrated multimodal and fluorescence imaging microscope based on LED illumination

As live cell imaging has become a research hotspot in the biomedical field, optical microscopy imaging has become one of its most beneficial and critical research tools. Fluorescence microscopy imaging provides an effective and direct visualization for cell observation in a specifically labeled manner. Non-invasive imaging modalities such as dark field and differential phase contrast imaging enable high contrast observation of samples. Some applications often require a combination of the advantages of these two types of microscopic imaging techniques to achieve a full view and specific detection of cells. However, there is a lack of a microscope system that combines both of these imaging modalities. We designed a miniaturized multimodal fluorescence microscopy system that couples a two-channel drop-in fluorescence microscopy light path with high brightness LED units as the illumination source and a transmission multimodal microscopy light path with programmable LED arrays as the illumination source, realizing diverse imaging methods such as fluorescence, bright-field, dark-field, Rheinberg optical staining imaging and differential phase contrast imaging in the same system. The system enables a full range of diverse observations of biological samples. Furthermore, the entire system uses multiple mirrors to reduce the size of the folded optical path and can be built into the cell culture chamber for real-time observation of live cells to avoid exogenous contact and contamination.