SBIR Phase I: Smart Petri Dish with Built-in Imaging Capabilities for Cell Culture Monitoring

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop the Smart Petri Dish, a lens-free subpixel resolution microscope, which will automate cell culture monitoring from within the incubator in a low-cost, easy-to-use system that provides high-resolution images over a wide field of view. Current cell culture experiments require significant manual labor, making them costly and inconvenient. To develop the Smart Petri Dish, we will design a unique demountable image sensor cartridge with thermal control, develop a novel multithread sparse convolution filtering software algorithm for subpixel resolution image construction, enhance the spatial resolution of the lens-free imaging method with a dense illumination array, and test the resulting prototype Smart Petri Dish for its ability to reliably culture cells. It is anticipated that this research will demonstrate the feasibility of a commercially viable prototype system that can be further developed into a successful commercial product in Phase II of the project. The broader impact/commercial potential of this project, if successful, will be a system that will automate cell culture experiments and remove much of the cumbersome manual labor. As a low-cost, compact diagnostic tool, it will enable research and diagnosis in geographically dispersed regions where there is limited access to centralized cell culture laboratories. And, in primary education laboratories, it will introduce a large number of high school students to cell culture experimental methods and techniques, thanks to its low cost and simplicity of operation. Together, these impacts will enhance scientific and technological understanding of cell growth, and bring new tools to research, diagnosis, and education. The potential commercial value of the Smart Petri Dish is $10 M per year in revenues by the third year of production, based upon realistic projections of market size and potential market share.