Squid
ABSTRACT
With rapid developments in microscopy methods, highly versatile, robust and affordable implementations are needed to enable rapid and wide adoption by the biological sciences community. Here we report Squid, a quantitative imaging platform with a full suite of hardware and software components and configurations for deploying facility-grade widefield microscopes with advanced features like flat field fluorescence excitation, patterned illumination and tracking microscopy, at a fraction of the cost of commercial solutions. The open and modular nature (both in hardware and in software) lowers the barrier for deployment, and importantly, simplifies development, making the system highly configurable and experiments that can run on the system easily programmable. Developed with the goal of helping translate the rapid advances in the field of microscopy and microscopy-enabled methods, including those powered by deep learning, we envision Squid will simplify roll-out of microscopy-based applications - including at point of care and in low resource settings, make adoption of new or otherwise advanced techniques easier, and significantly increase the available microscope-hours to labs.
BIG QUESTION
“How can we help accelerate the paradigm shift in malaria and TB microscopy?”
What is Squid?
Squid is a quantitative imaging platform with a full suite of hardware and software components and configurations for deploying facility-grade widefield microscopes at a fraction of the cost of commercial solutions. Developed with the goal of helping translate the rapid advances in the field of microscopy and microscopy-enabled methods, including those powered by deep learning, we envision Squid will simplify roll-out of microscopy-based applications - including at point of care and in low resource settings, make adoption of new or otherwise advanced techniques easier, and significantly increase the available microscope-hours to labs.
More than 50 squids have been built till now and they are used by more than 25 labs around world for a wide range of applications and also enable new solutions.
Significance
Manual microscopy has served as a bedrock for the diagnostics of various infectious diseases, although at a cost of tedious labor and human errors. Imagine looking for 1 to 5 parasites amongst 5 million red blood cells. Currently, microscopists can take up to 10-15 minutes to review a single slide. Automated robotic microscopes are poised to enable a new era of smart field microscopy but current platforms remain cost prohibitive and largely inflexible, especially for resource-poor and field settings.
