Digital imaging scanning system and biomedical applications for biochips.

Biochips have been an advanced technology for biomedical applications since the end of the 20th century. Optical detection systems have been a very important tool in biochip analysis. Microscopes are often inadequate for high resolution and big view-area detection of microarray chips, thus some new optical instruments are required. In this work, a novel digital imaging scanning system with dark-field irradiation is developed for some biomedical applications for microarray chips, characterized by analyzing genes and proteins of clinical samples with high specific, parallel, and nanoliter samples. The novel optical system has a high numerical aperture (NA=0.72), a long working distance (wd>3.0 mm), an excellent contrast and signal-to-noise ratio, a high resolving power close to 3 mum, and an efficiency of collected fluorescence more than two-fold better than that of other commercial confocal biochip scanners. An edge overlap algorithm is proposed for the image restructure of free area detection and correcting scanning position errors to a precision of 1 pixel. A novel algorithm is explored for recognizing the target from the scanning images conveniently, removing noise, and producing the signal matrix of biochip analysis. The digital imaging scanning system is equally as good for the detection of enclosed biochips as it is for the detection of biological samples on a slide surface covered with a glass cover slip or in culture solution. The clinical bacteria identification and serum antibody detection of biochips are described.