Dynamics of cell and tissue growth acquired by means of 25 mm² to 10 cm² lensfree imaging

International audienceIn this paper, we discuss a new methodology based on lens-free imaging to perform wound healing assay with unprecedented statistics. Our video lens-free microscopy setup is a simple optical system featuring only a CMOS sensor and a semi coherent illumination system. Yet it is a powerful means for the real-time monitoring of cultivated cells. It presents several key advantages, e.g., integration into standard incubator, compatibility with standard cell culture protocol, simplicity and ease of use. It can perform the follow-up in a large field of view (25 mm2) of several crucial parameters during the culture of cells i.e. their motility, their proliferation rate or their death. Consequently the setup can gather large statistics both in space and time. But in the case of tissue growth experiments, the field of view of 25 mm2 remains not sufficient and results can be biased depending on the position of the device with respect to the recipient of the cell culture. Hence, to conduct exhaustive wound healing assay, here we propose to enlarge the field of view up to 10 cm2 through two different approaches. The first method consists in performing a scan of the cell culture by moving the source/sensor couple and then stitch the stack of images. The second is to make an acquisition by scanning with a line scan camera. The two approaches are compared in term of resolution, complexity and acquisition time. Next we have performed acquisitions of wound healing assay (keratinocytes HaCaT) both in real-time (25 mm2) and in final point (10 cm2) to assess the combination of these two complementary modalities. In the future, we aim at combining directly super wide field of view acquisitions (>10 cm2) with real time ability inside the incubator