Cell shape identification using digital holographic microscopy

TL;DR

This paper introduces a cost-effective digital holographic microscopy technique that rapidly identifies cell shapes and positions, useful for studying fast morphological changes in high-throughput biological assays.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel, simple, and fast method based on Rayleigh-Sommerfeld back propagation for cell shape identification using digital holography.

Findings

Accurately determines cell shape and axial position from holograms.

Effective on synthetic and experimental images of cells and beads.

Suitable for high-throughput flow chamber assays.

Abstract

We present a cost-effective, simple and fast digital holographic microscopy method based upon Rayleigh-Sommerfeld back propagation for identification of the geometrical shape of a cell. The method was tested using synthetic hologram images generated by ray-tracing software and from experimental images of semi-transparent spherical beads and living red blood cells. Our results show that by only using the real part of the back-reconstructed amplitude the proposed method can provide information of the geometrical shape of the object and at the same time accurately determine the axial position of the object under study. The proposed method can be used in flow chamber assays for pathophysiological studies where fast morphological changes of cells are studied in high numbers and at different heights.