Gigapixel microscopy using a flatbed scanner

Microscopy imaging systems with a very wide field-of-view (FOV) are highly sought in biomedical applications. In this paper, we report a wide FOV microscopy imaging system that uses a low-cost scanner and a closed-circuit-television (CCTV) lens. We show that such an imaging system is capable to capture a 10 mm * 7.5 mm FOV image with 0.77 micron resolution, resulting in 0.54 gigapixels (109 pixels) across the entire image (26400 pixels * 20400 pixels). The resolution and field curve of the proposed system were characterized by imaging a USAF resolution target and a hole-array target. A 1.6 gigapixel microscopy image (0.54 gigapixel with 3 colors) of a pathology slide was acquired by using such a system for application demonstration.