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Biofluidic Random Laser Cytometer for Biophysical Phenotyping of Cell Suspensions
journal contribution
posted on 2019-03-11, 00:00 authored by Jijun He, Shuhuan Hu, Jifeng Ren, Xin Cheng, Zhijia Hu, Ning Wang, Huangui Zhang, Raymond H. W. Lam, Hwa-Yaw TamPhenotypic
profiling of single floating cells in liquid biopsies
is the key to the era of precision medicine. A random laser in biofluids
is a promising tool for the label-free characterization of the biophysical
properties as a result of the high brightness and sharp peaks of the
lasing spectra, yet previous reports were limited to the random laser
in solid tissues with dense scattering. In this report, a random laser
cytometer is demonstrated in an optofluidic device filled with gain
medium and human breast normal/cancerous cells. The multiple lightscattering
event induced by the microscale human cells promotes random lasing
and influences the lasing properties in term of laser modes, spectral
wavelengths, and lasing thresholds. A sensing strategy based on analyzing
the lasing properties is developed to determine both the whole
cell and the subcellular biophysical properties, and the malignant
alterations of the cell suspensions are successfully detected. Our
results provide a new approach to designing a label-free biophysical
cytometer based on optofluidic random laser devices, which is advantageous
for further research in the field of random laser bioapplication.