"Real-time automated identification of pathogenic micro/nano biological organisms or other specimens has many potential applications in security and defense or health related applications. Developing reliable, automated, and low-cost methods for real-time sensing, monitoring, and identification of harmful pathogens or malignant cells is beneficial in combating catastrophic pandemics, providing disease detection and monitoring for emerging medical treatment procedures, food safety, environmental health and safety monitoring. ...
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"Real-time automated identification of pathogenic micro/nano biological organisms or other specimens has many potential applications in security and defense or health related applications. Developing reliable, automated, and low-cost methods for real-time sensing, monitoring, and identification of harmful pathogens or malignant cells is beneficial in combating catastrophic pandemics, providing disease detection and monitoring for emerging medical treatment procedures, food safety, environmental health and safety monitoring. Conventional methods used to inspect and identify bacteria and other biological species often involve labor-intensive and time-consuming biochemical and/or biomolecular processing. Optical imaging systems based on digital holography and integral imaging have been extensively investigated for 3D visualization and recognition of rigid, macro objects. However, biological organisms are typically non-rigid and exhibit dynamic behavior such as moving, dividing and growing. This makes it difficult to identify biological species based on their shape, size or morphology in conventional 2D imaging. Moreover, many unicellular biological species such as bacteria, yeast or protozoans appear essentially transparent under bright field microscopes unless the specimen is stained and/or fixed: a process in which the cells are killed and dynamics cannot be studied. Meanwhile, 2D intensity images of the microorganisms are usually insufficient for identification or visualization of transparent microorganism parts, e.g. sperm tails. Therefore, developing high-speed, low-cost and reliable system for three-dimensional (3D) analysis, visualization, identification and monitoring of harmful pathogens or biological cells are essential"--
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