Stain-free mammalian cell counting and viability measurement platform

Abstract

Cell viability and counting are the crucial parameter in the area of toxicology, drug screening and diagnosis of many diseases. A hemocytometer has been widely utilized for the cell evaluation platform over the last 100 years however, this manual method is time consuming and often suffers from the operator’s subjective error. Various cell counters have been commercially developed for an automated platform nevertheless, specific reagents are necessary to perform the viability and counting of cells. These reagents are also generally expensive and require careful and precise handling for error free characterization. This work reports a reagent free automated cell characterization method using the lens-free shadow imaging system (LSIS) which are recently developed.