Augmented quantitative phase imaging for large-scale label-free cancer-cell detection from heterogeneous tumors

We present a quantitative phase image (QPI) reconstruction method using generative deep learning (with high similarity of 91% and low error rate of < 1%), and its ability to integrate with a high-throughput microfluidic multimodal imaging flow cytometry platform (called multi-ATOM) that can consistently classify cancer cells in heterogeneous tumors from human non-small cell lung cancer patients at large scale (~200,000 cells) and high accuracy (~98%); and can reveal biophysical heterogeneity of tumors. This work represents another groundwork of synergizing high-throughput QPI and deep learning for future label-free intelligent clinical cancer diagnosis.