Common-path diffraction optical tomography for investigation of three-dimensional structures and dynamics of biological cells

Abstract

We present an optical holographic micro-tomographic technique for imaging both the three-dimensional structures and dynamics of biological cells. Optical light field images of a sample, illuminated by a plane wave with various illumination angles, are measured in a common-path interferometry, and thus both the three-dimensional refractive index tomogram and two-dimensional dynamics of live biological cells are measured with extremely high sensitivity. The applicability of the technique is demonstrated through quantitative and measurements of morphological, chemical, and mechanical parameters at the individual cell level.

Holographic tomography with scanning of illumination: space-domain reconstruction for spatially invariant accuracy

“…The high potential of HT is widely appreciated in life sciences and biomedicine, where it is used for minimally invasive 3D imaging of unstained, living, cellular specimens [1][2][3][4][5]. However, to enable the study of sensitive biological materials, originally proposed HT technique applying the object rotation configuration (ORC) [2,[5][6][7][8][9][10] had to be modified to minimize the risk of damaging a sample.…”

“…Currently, with a few exceptions [5][6][7], the biomedical-oriented HT systems utilize a tomographic concept in which physical manipulation of a sample is completely eliminated. In those systems different sample projections are achieved by scanning an illumination beam, while keeping a sample and a detector fixed [1][2][3][4]. The illumination scanning configuration (ISC) is favorable in terms of noninvasity and high speed of data acquisition.…”

“…Regardless of its pros and cons, numerous scientific publications [1,3,4,13,14] and commercial implementations [15,16] clearly demonstrate the potential of ISC-HT for 3D imaging in various biomedical application fields. Currently, ISC-HT systems are constantly further improved and evaluated with increasingly demanding samples such as single living cells with complex shapes or cell clusters.…”

Space-domain, filtered backpropagation algorithm for tomographic configuration with scanning of illumination

“…The technique has found numerous applications in various areas of industry and science, ranging from technical inspection of elements of fiber optics [1][2][3] to biomedical study of cell morphology [4][5][6]. The principle of HT is based on holographic registration of multiple scattered fields captured for various angular perspectives.…”

High-Resolution 3-D Refractive Index Tomography and 2-D Synthetic Aperture Imaging of Live Phytoplankton

“…Recently, there has been an emergence of quantitative phase imaging (QPI) or digital holography techniques and their applications in the study of transparent phase objects such as biological cells and tissues [7][8][9][10][11][12][13]. The QPI techniques − based on light interferometry − quantitatively measure optical path length shifts introduced by the refractive index (RI) distribution in a specimen.…”