Red Blood Cell as Optofluidic Tunable Lens

We show that seeing an erythrocyte-ensemble as microlens-array, detection of abnormal cells can be made rapidly and efficiently without recurring to subjective shape analysis of image by the doctor or by sophisticated image processing tools, but rather by exploiting their abnormal shape alterations affecting the lens-focusing properties. Demonstration of how aberrations affect the focusing properties of the RBCs is given by Harthman-Shark approach and Zernike polynomial-fitting, as occurs for wavefront aberration correction in adaptive modern astronomic telescopes. The results show how the concept of biological lens could be addressed for revolutionary integration between photonics and biology and that a fast blood pre-screening can be performed by the proposed approach.