From high-throughput imaging to functional insight: lensless imaging moves beyond structure

Abstract Lensless imaging offers a scalable, hardware-light route to optical microscopy but has largely remained structural. In a recent study, Wang et al . demonstrate that molecular specificity can be intrinsically encoded and computationally recovered within a fully lensless framework. This work reframes lensless imaging from scaling structure to encoding function, highlighting an emerging paradigm in which optical simplicity and information completeness are co-designed through optics and com