Lighting Every Corner: Wide Field Illumination

Many fluorescence-based instruments need to analyze or image large areas quickly — from flow cells and multi-well plates, to the entire field of view of a microscope. The throughput of these instruments, however, is often limited by their ability to uniformly illuminate the full field of view with sufficient excitation light of the right wavelengths. As molecular diagnostics and sequencing find increasing application in clinical treatment, throughput is a significant cost barrier to widespread adoption.

One approach to scanning large areas is to illuminate a small area at a time with the desired intensity, stitching together multiple measurements to cover the entire sample area. This increases the time needed for a single sample measurement, but offers the benefit of good fluorescence signal strength. Alternatively, the same beam can be expanded to cover the full field of view to eliminate scanning, but with a corresponding loss in signal.

The ideal solution, however, is an illumination source that can provide the needed intensity over a sufficiently large field of view to reduce scanning. In response, IDEX Health & Science has developed a Wide Field Illumination Module capable of delivering uniform, high-intensity output over a large field of view at multiple wavelengths. Designed for drop-in OEM integration, the module may be customized with up to five LED and/or laser sources to provide fields of view of up to several millimeters. Using proprietary beam-shaping technology, the module can redistribute even the most non-uniform source beam distributions to have better than 10% beam uniformity.