Publications

If you’ve used our work, please consider citing the most relevant papers below, or our 2020 Robotic microscopy for everyone paper as:
Collins, J.T. et al. (2020) “Robotic Microscopy for everyone: The OpenFlexure Microscope”, Biomedical Optics Express, 11(5), p. 2447. doi:10.1364/boe.385729.

To write about our work, our press pack is available here, and we’re always excited to hear from people with an interest in our projects, our engineering, or our story so far. Feel free to contact Joe and Julian or to meet the community on our forum.

Publications and conferences

The work of the OpenFlexure project has been published in scientific journals and presented at conferences.

Title	Year	Journal / Conference
Developing the OpenFlexure Microscope towards medical use: technical and social challenges of developing globally accessible hardware for healthcare	2024	Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A
Utility of a low-cost 3-D printed microscope for evaluating esophageal biopsies	2024	Annals of 3D Printed Medicine
Controlling and scripting laboratory hardware with open-source, intuitive interfaces: OpenFlexure Voice Control and OpenFlexure Blockly arXiv	2023	Royal Society Open Science
Multi-modal microscopy imaging with the OpenFlexure Delta Stage arXiv	2022	Optics Express
Simplifying the OpenFlexure Microscope software with the web of things	2021	Royal Society Open Science
Fast, high precision autofocus on a motorised microscope: automating blood sample imaging on the OpenFlexure Microscope	2021	Journal of Microscopy
HardOps: Utilising the software development toolchain for hardware design	2021	TechRxiv
An Open‐Source Modular Framework for Automated Pipetting and Imaging Applications	2021	Advanced Biology
Transitioning from Academic Innovation to Viable Humanitarian Technology: The Next Steps for the OpenFlexure Project	2021	IST-Africa conference
Low-cost, multimodal bioimaging with the OpenFlexure Delta Stage Microscope	2020	RMS Frontiers in Bioimaging
The OpenFlexure Project. The technical challenges of Co-Developing a microscope in the UK and Tanzania AfricaArXiv	2020	IEEE Global Humanitarian Technology Conference (GHTC)
Robotic microscopy for everyone: the OpenFlexure Microscope bioRxiv preprint Best paper prize	2020	Biomedical Optics Express
The OpenFlexure Block Stage: sub-100 nm fibre alignment with a monolithic plastic flexure stage	2020	Optics Express
Flat-Field and Colour Correction for the Raspberry Pi Camera Module	2020	Journal of Open Hardware
A one-piece 3D printed flexure translation stage for open-source microscopy	2016	Review of Scientific Instruments

Citing publications

The OpenFlexure project is now used and cited by a growing number of academic publications. If you have used the designs in your work, please let us know and we’ll add you to the list below.

• Jay Christopher, Rebecca Craig, Rebecca E. McHugh, Andrew J. Roe, Ralf Bauer, Brian Patton, Gail McConnell, Liam M. Rooney, A 3D-printed optical microscope for low-cost histological imaging, Journal of Microscopy, 298, 274–282
• P. Thongtade and W. Pora, Development of an Autoscan Motorized Microscope Utilizing the OpenFlexure Architecture ECTI-CON, Thailand, (2024)
• Sven Schulze, Kumar Arumugam, Stephan Schlamminger, Ryan Fitzgerald, R Michael Verkouteren, René Theska and Gordon Shaw, Development of a high precision electrostatic force balance for measuring quantity of dispensed fluid as a new calibration standard for the becquerel, Meas. Sci. Technol. 35 085020 (2024)
• Koki Uebo, Yuto Shiokawa, Ryunosuke Takahashi, Suguru Nakata and Hiroki Wadati Development of a magneto-optical Kerr microscope using a 3D printer [version 2; peer review: 1 approved, 1 not approved]. F1000Research 2024, 12:860
• Mark Kristan Espejo Cabello and Jeremie E. De Guzman Utilization of accessible resources in the fabrication of an affordable, portable, high-resolution, 3D printed, digital microscope for Philippine diagnostic applications, PLoS Global Public Health 3(11): e0002070 (2023)
• A. Reguilon, W. Bethard and E. Brekke A low-cost confocal microscope for the undergraduate lab, American Journal Physics 91(5): 404 (2023)
• Tai The Diep, Sarah Helen Needs, Samuel Bizley, and Alexander D. Edwards Rapid Bacterial Motility Monitoring Using Inexpensive 3D-Printed OpenFlexure Microscopy Allows Microfluidic Antibiotic Susceptibility Testing Micromachines 13, no. 11: 1974 (2022)
• T. Matsui and D. Fujiwara Optical sectioning robotic microscopy for everyone: the structured illumination microscope with the OpenFlexure stages, Opt. Express 30(13), pp. 23208-23216 (2022).
• Bowen Chen, Max Nadeau, Ming Y. Lu, Jana Lipkova, and Faisal Mahmood Real Time, Point-of-Care Pathology Diagnosis via Embedded Deep Learning, a poster awarded the “best research” prize at Pathology Visions 2020
• Stephen D. Grant, Kyle Richford, Heidi L. Burdett, David McKee and Brian R. Patton Low-cost, open-access quantitative phase imaging of algal cells using the transport of intensity equation Royal Society Open Science 7, 1 (2020)
• Grant SD, Cairns GS, Wistuba J and Patton BR. Adapting the 3D-printed Openflexure microscope enables computational super-resolution imaging [version 1; peer review: 2 approved]. F1000Research 2019, 8:2003