Wide-field, high-resolution Fourier ptychographic microscopy

TL;DR

This paper introduces Fourier ptychographic microscopy (FPM), a computational imaging technique that combines multiple low-resolution images to produce wide-field, high-resolution, aberration-corrected images with extended depth-of-focus.

Contribution

The authors present a novel FPM method that digitally extends a microscope's resolution and depth-of-focus, overcoming physical optical limitations through computational reconstruction.

Findings

Achieved 0.78 μm resolution over 120 mm² field-of-view

Successfully corrected aberrations and extended depth-of-focus digitally

Produced gigapixel color images of histology slides

Abstract

In this article, we report an imaging method, termed Fourier ptychographic microscopy (FPM), which iteratively stitches together a number of variably illuminated, low-resolution intensity images in Fourier space to produce a wide-field, high-resolution complex sample image. By adopting a wavefront correction strategy, the FPM method can also correct for aberrations and digitally extend a microscope's depth-of-focus beyond the physical limitations of its optics. As a demonstration, we built a microscope prototype with a resolution of 0.78 um, a field-of-view of ~120 mm2, and a resolution-invariant depth-of-focus of 0.3 mm (characterized at 632 nm). Gigapixel colour images of histology slides verify FPM's successful operation. The reported imaging procedure transforms the general challenge of high-throughput, high-resolution microscopy from one that is coupled to the physical limitations of the system's optics to one that is solvable through computation.