Fig. 1.

System setup and method for UV microscopy of blood samples. (A) Schematic of the deep-UV microscope consisting of an ultrabroadband plasma source, short-pass dichroic mirror, UV band-pass filters, UV microscope objective, and UV-sensitive camera. (B) Pseudocolorization scheme with optimized weights and gamma values for each channel along with an example colorized UV and its respective Giemsa-stained bright-field image. Nucleic acid and protein mass maps of the same cell are also shown. (Scale bar: 5 µm.) (C) Schematic of the blood smear sample preparation and imaging protocol. Blood smears were imaged immediately with the UV system, then the smears were fixed, stained, and imaged with a conventional bright-field microscope for comparison.