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Summary We describe a novel holographic otoscope system for measuring nano-displacements of objects subjected to dynamic excitation. Such measurements are necessary to quantify the mechanical deformation of surfaces in mechanics, acoustics, electronics, biology and many other fields. In particular, we are interested in measuring the sound-induced motion of biological samples, such as an eardrum. Our holographic otoscope system consists of laser illumination delivery (IS), optical head (OH), and image processing computer (IP) systems. The IS delivers the object beam (OB) and the reference beam (RB) to the OH. The backscattered light coming from the object illuminated by the OB interferes with the RB at the camera sensor plane to be digitally recorded as a hologram. The hologram is processed by the IP using Fresnel numerical reconstruction algorithm, where the focal plane can be selected freely. Our holographic otoscope system is currently deployed in a clinic, and is packaged in a custom design. It is mounted in a mechatronic positioning system to increase its maneuverability degrees to be conveniently positioned in front of the object to be measured. We present representative results highlighting the versatility of our system to measure deformations of complex elastic surfaces in the wavelength scale including a copper foil membrane and postmortem tympanic membrane (TM).

Suitable extraction of an object’s wave field in an off-axis digital holographic array is the core for any numerical reconstruction process. In this manuscript, we propose an algorithm that reduces the number of pixels needed for an object’s wave field trimming, reducing notably its processing time without significant changes in the quality of the reconstructed image. Our method generates an extraction window containing a complete object’s wave field. The energy that the generated extraction window must contain is analyzed, defined, and used as a reference value. Our proposal reduces significantly the number of operations and execution time for holographic reconstruction.

Digital holographic microscopy (DHM) is a technique that has high potential for analyzing biological samples and has been successfully applied to the study of cells and cell lines providing information about important parameters such as refractive index, morphology, and dry mass, among others; it has also found applicability to study the effects of therapeutic treatments. Finding the size and shape of cells is important since they tend to change in the presence of some pathologies. In this research work, we obtain the morphology thickness and refractive index of the A375 melanoma cell line through a slight tilting of the cell in a DHM setup. Further, the development of a novel mathematical expression based on this tilt and in the optical phase difference is presented. We show images of melanoma cells with the refractive index information included, and their morphology thickness as rendered from the holographic phase maps recorded with DHM.

In this work, we show a windowed phase-unwrapping technique that uses a first-order dynamic system and scans the phase following its iso-phase contours. In previous works, we have shown that low-pass first-order dynamic systems are very robust and useful in phase-unwrapping problems. However, it is well known that all phase-unwrapping methods have a minimum signal-to-noise ratio that they tolerate. This paper shows that scanning the phase within local windows and using a path following strategy, the first-order unwrapping method increases its tolerance to noise. In this way, using the improved approach, we can unwrap phase maps where the basic dynamic phase-unwrapping system fails. Tests and results are given, as well as the source code in order to show the performance of the proposed method.