Development of optical and acoustic hybrid microscope for visualization of a single cell

Acoustic microscope can measure the acoustic parameters of living cells. It is expected that disease mechanism is elucidated, and that treatment methods is developed by analyzing structure and function of cells. In this study, the optical and acoustic hybrid microscope has been developed. The ultrasonic transducer has 250 MHz. As a result of imaging the 3T3-L1 mouse fibroblasts, good contrast was achieved in the portion of the cell nucleus and pseudopod in the acoustic image. In addition, two-dimensional color images of thickness and sound speed of the cell were successfully obtained by using time-resolved analysis. The average thickness was 7.9 μm, and sound speed was 1602 m/s.