Miniaturized on-sensor fluorescence flow cytometer

Flow cytometers are powerful instruments used in both basic research and clinical medicine for high-throughput single cell analysis. Decades of engineering have pushed these devices to the limits of their design based on measuring one cell at a time. In order to increase the throughput by the factor of 100 required to measure rare cells such as circulating tumor cells, a new parallel architecture will have to be developed. This paper demonstrates that the technology of lensless fluorescence imaging can be combined with microfluidic technology to perform highly parallel flow cytometry.