ABSTRACT

Optical imaging has become a powerful tool for biomedical research as well as clinical diagnostics. One of the most important features of optical imaging methods is that they can, in general, provide a decent spatial resolution without exposing the specimen to high-energy radiation. While such useful resolution is limited to small depths within the specimen (typically a few hundreds of microns), optical imaging methods are still widely used in biomedicine as they can also provide molecular specicity based on, e.g., absorption, •uorescence, or scattering processes. Among these contrast mechanisms, •uorescence deserves a special attention since it has been widely utilized not only for microscopy but also for various high-throughput screening applications including antibody microarrays [29] and biochemical assays [27], bringing specicity and sensitivity to the imaging platform within reasonable cost and ease of use [10,12,21]. In particular, •uorescent-based high-throughput separation and sorting of heterogeneous samples into puried cell populations has been quite valuable to study eukaryotic cells for enhancing our understanding of diseases and cell-based therapies [17].