Lensfree microscopy: A new framework for the imaging of viruses, bacteria, cells and tissue

Lensfree imaging is an emerging microscopy technique based on in-line holography as invented by Gabor in 1948. Albeit the existence of the method since decades, the recent development of digital sensors, helped the realization of its full potential. Over the recent years, innovations and improvements in CMOS imaging technology design and fabrication have allowed to decrease the pixel pitch down to ~1μm and the number of pixels has dramatically increased up to 250 million of pixels. As a result, the performance of lensfree microscopy, which features a bare CMOS sensor without any magnification optics, have tremendously increased while keeping the design simple, robust, and at a reasonable low cost. The detection ability improved from 10 μm (cell) in 2009, to 1 μm (bacteria) in 2010, down to 100 nm beads in 2012, paving the way to the detection of viruses in 2013.