Imaging method could improve insight into fertility treatments

Over the course of the study, reported online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), researchers followed 24,000 rapidly moving cells over wide fields of view and through large sample volumes, recording each cell’s path for up to 20 seconds.

‘We can very precisely track the motion of small things, more than 1,000 of them at the same time, in parallel,’ said research lead and National Science Foundation CAREER awardee Aydogan Ozcan, an electrical engineering and bioengineering professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). ‘We were able to achieve sub-micron accuracy over a large volume, allowing us to understand, statistically, how thousands of objects move in different ways.’

According to a statement, Ozcan and his colleagues — Ting-Wei Su, also of UCLA, and Liang Xue, of both UCLA and Nanjing University of Science and Technology in China — used offset beams of red and blue light to create holographic information that, when processed, accurately reveals the paths of objects moving under a microscope.