Fig. 1: Compact microscopes and its properties.

a The appearance of our compact microscope and the form of an LRWSI. The optical module contains L1 and L2, two lens sets. L2 is fixed, and L1 is controlled by a voice coil motor (VCM) to support autofocusing. We use a CMOS sensor to capture the image and transmitted a light-emitting diode (LED) light source to illuminate the sample between the light source and the objective lens. A system on a chip (SoC) is used to control the whole process and storage acquired LRWSIs. An LRWSI is usually composed of about 90 views of images with 3840 × 3160 pixels and 0.87 μm/pixel. b Imaging quality comparison between a standard microscope and our compact microscope. The left composite image juxtaposes a high-resolution (HR) region (upper-right quadrant, captured by a standard microscope) with a low-resolution (LR) region (lower-left quadrant, obtained using our compact microscope). The right panel statistically quantifies contrast and noise differences: contrast level is calculated as the absolute difference between average nuclear pixel intensity and average cytoplasmic pixel intensity, divided by the average cytoplasmic pixel intensity. The noise level is defined as the standard deviation of the background pixel. Each data point in the contrast level is derived from a single cell in different images, and each data point in the noise level is derived from different images. Statistical significance (Paired samples t test, n = 13, *** denotes p < 0.001) confirms the contrast of LR images is significantly lower than that of HR images, while the noise level is significantly higher. Source data are provided as a Source Data file.