Flow cytometry typically flows particles or cells through a laminar flow cell into an interrogating laser beam to be read out as flourescent signal with a photomultiplier or photodiode. The read out is typically the integrated intensity or a two dimensional projection of a cell. The residence time is in order of 10 micro-seconds. Cellular high resolution microscopy in contrast acquires 2D or 3D image of the cell but the process is excruciatingly slow. A researcher at East Carolina university, Dr Xin-Hua Hu has been analyzing diffraction images of cells passing through flow cytometer. The concept being that you will be able to acquire multi-dimensional images very quickly that will have information about the shape, location and other information about the cellular components. The diffraction images do not look like any images that you have seen before of cells and instead look like clouds in the sky. However the anticipation is that these images are unique enough to distinguish and quantitate one cell from the other.
