Fourier ptychographic microscopy on a smartphone: high-resolution, wide-field imaging using screen illumination

We propose a simple smartphone attachment module to realize a portable wide-field high-resolution microscope based on Fourier Ptychographic Microscopy (FPM). Using the smartphone's screen as the illumination and the front camera module for image acquisition, we can construct a stand-alone portable FPM, a microscopy technique that can achieve high resolution by computationally combining a number of variably illuminated low-resolution bright-field and dark-field images through an iterative phase retrieval algorithm. With the custom-built android application that performs in situ calculation for acquisition, reconstruction, and display of the images, we can achieve a true stand-alone portable imaging device for field applications.