Interactive manipulation of blood cells using a lens-integrated liquid crystal display based optoelectronic tweezers system

This paper reports a lens-integrated liquid crystal display (LCD)-based optoelectronic tweezers (OET) system for interactive manipulation of polystyrene microspheres and blood cells by optically induced dielectrophoretic force. When a dynamic image pattern is projected into a specific area of a photoconductive layer in an OET virtual electrodes are generated by spatially resolved illumination of the photoconductive layer, resulting in dielectrophoresis of microparticles suspended in the liquid layer under nonuniform electric field. In this study, the simple-structured OET system has been easily constructed with an OET device, an LCD and a condenser lens integrated in a conventional microscope. By using a condenser lens, both stronger dielectrophoretic forces and higher virtual electrode resolution than previously reported lens-less LCD-based OET platform are obtained. The effects of blurred LCD image and liquid chamber height on the performances of optoelectronic particle manipulation are investigated by measuring the bead velocities according to their sizes. An interactive control program for OET-based microparticle manipulation is also developed by Flash language. The integrated system is successfully applied to the parallel and interactive manipulation of red and white blood cells. Due to its simple structures, cheap manufacturing costs, and high performances, this new LCD-based OET platform may be a widely usable integrated system for optoelectronic manipulation of microparticles including living cells.