High-throughput intensity diffraction tomography with a computational microscope

TL;DR

This paper introduces a motion-free intensity diffraction tomography method that reconstructs 3D phase and absorption from intensity measurements, enabling high-resolution imaging of biological samples with minimal hardware modifications.

Contribution

A novel linear forward model and efficient reconstruction algorithm for 3D imaging using angled illumination on standard microscopes.

Findings

Achieves resolution up to the incoherent limit.

Effective for weakly scattering biological samples.

Evaluates limitations with strongly scattering samples.

Abstract

We demonstrate a motion-free intensity diffraction tomography technique that enables direct inversion of 3D phase and absorption from intensity-only measurements for weakly scattering samples. We derive a novel linear forward model, featuring slice-wise phase and absorption transfer functions using angled illumination. This new framework facilitates flexible and efficient data acquisition, enabling arbitrary sampling of the illumination angles. The reconstruction algorithm performs 3D synthetic aperture using a robust, computation and memory efficient slice-wise deconvolution to achieve resolution up to the incoherent limit. We demonstrate our technique with thick biological samples having both sparse 3D structures and dense cell clusters. We further investigate the limitation of our technique when imaging strongly scattering samples. Imaging performance and the influence of multiple scattering is evaluated using a 3D sample consisting of stacked phase and absorption resolution targets. This computational microscopy system is directly built on a standard commercial microscope with a simple LED array source add-on, and promises broad applications by leveraging the ubiquitous microscopy platforms with minimal hardware modifications.