Gigapixel fluorescence microscopy with a water immersion microlens array

We demonstrate high throughput gigapixel fluorescence microscopy with a microlens array. We show, for the first time to the best of our knowledge, the use of a parallelized microscopy system to image samples in micro well plates. We image centimeter-scale regions of 384-well micro well plates at 1.72 μm resolution at a raw pixel throughput of 25.4 Mpx/s. Taking into account the fact that about half the well plate area consists of the plastic support region between wells, this corresponds to a sample pixel throughput of 13.2 Mpx/s, more than double that of the commercial state-of-the-art at the time of writing. Fluorescent imaging of tissue samples through coverslips is also demonstrated.