Time-gated approach for lens-free fluorescence microscopy

Fluorescent nano-particle labeling methods produce high contrast signals for rare-cell detection. Unfortunately, many imaging methods cannot yet reach adequate space-bandwidth products for these samples. We propose a lens-free time-gated fluorescence system using pulsed excitation and long-lifetime fluorescent nanoparticles. We minimize the required sample to sensor distance by applying a temporal filter instead of spectral filters and achieve a resolution of 8.77 μm. This approach simplifies the architecture, requires minimal image reconstruction, and reduces system size and cost. Our method surpasses the performance of other non-computational fluorescent lens-free imaging approaches and provides a foundation for future resolution enhancement.