Imaging flow cytometry (IFC) has become an established tool for cell analysis across diverse biomedical fields. However, the performance of IFC is severely limited by the fundamental trade-off among multi-color, flow speed and exposure time. Here we develop multiplex imaging flow cytometry (mIFC) that overcomes this trade-off by utilizing unique single-source single-detector technology for sensitive detection of ovarian cancer cells with the content-aware image restoration method. Our mIFC achieves efficient, non-interfering 4-channel excitation and 3-channel emission based on a metal halide lamp. The spatial wavelength division multiplexing technology with a knife-edge right-angle prism is the key optical design to simultaneously obtain brightfield and multi-color fluorescence images of individual cells in flow on a single detector. A U-net variant deep learning network based on a 3-layer encoder-decoder structure is employed to perform content-aware image restoration on captured multiplex ovarian cell images. The blurred multiplex images are converted into enhanced images, which helps to balance the trade-off between flow speed and exposure time. Our multiplex imaging flow cytometry (mIFC) with content-aware image restoration deep learning method enables automatic, high-quality detection of ovarian cancer cells and has the potential broad applications in biomedical fields.
Imaging flow cytometry (IFC) has been widely applied in biomedical research due to its numerous advantages, including multiparametric analysis, microscopic imaging and high-throughput detection. Previous research in our lab has demonstrated the effectiveness of two-dimensional light scattering (LS) and brightfield (BF) dual-modality imaging techniques for detecting and distinguishing unlabeled cells. As fluorescence (FL) imaging techniques are sensitive to specifically labeled cells, here we introduce a single-detector IFC enabling simultaneous imaging of LS signals and BF/FL signals for automatic single-cell analysis with deep learning. The special optical design with a knife-edge right angle (KERA) prism is adopted to simultaneously capture corresponding LS patterns in defocus and BF/FL patterns in focus on a single detector. The LS and BF dual-modality flow imaging results of 2 μm and 3.87 μm unlabeled microspheres can be obtained by our system, which can also simultaneously acquire LS and FL results for fluorescent microspheres of 2 μm and 4 μm in diameter. The results of these beads demonstrate excellent agreement between LS patterns and Mie scattering simulations. The obtained LS and BF dual-modality cell images of A2780 and Hey cells are analyzed using a visual geometry group 19 (VGG19) deep learning method through feature extraction and fusion to show accurate classification of ovarian cancer cell subtypes. In conclusion, our development of a single-detector imaging flow cytometer enables the simultaneous capture of two-dimensional light-scattering and fluorescence/brightfield images, where an automatic analysis with deep learning can be performed, showcasing potential wide applications in biomedicine.
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