DISRUPT aims at revolutionising the field of biomedical imaging by developing a radically new lab-a-on-chip technology: integrated tomographic microscopy. This unprecedented technique will be enabled by pushing forward the science of on-chip wireless photonics and tomography, in combination with microfluidics and artificial intelligence (AI).
The CMOS compatibility of this technology will represent a paradigm shift as it assures the realization of tomographic microscopes that are dramatically cheaper, lighter, and smaller than current approaches. Moreover, the singular features of the proposed solution will introduce key advantages in terms of resolution, sensitivity, throughput, parallelisation, and energy efficiency.
To illustrate its potential, we will show that on-chip tomographic phase microscopy (TPM) can be used for cancer detection and the identification of infected cells. This novel device will be suited for many applications, such as early cancer diagnosis, cell characterisation, research on cancer and infectious diseases, immunocyte phenotyping, stem cell multipotency identification, tissue pathology, haematopathology, and analysis of infected cells. Its intrinsic mass-producible, compact, low-cost, mechanically robust, and energy-efficient feature will make this technology a future innovation driver for new developments in many biomedical application fields, and offers an alternative toolset addressing some of the emerging needs of microscopic analysis and diagnostics in low-resource settings, telemedicine applications and point-of-care, having a potentially huge societal impact fostering early diagnosis of cancer and other diseases and infections.