High throughput spatially sensitive single-shot quantitative phase microscopy

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel QPM system using pseudo-thermal light that achieves high spatial phase sensitivity and large FOV simultaneously, enabling rapid biomedical imaging without sacrificing resolution.

Contribution

The work demonstrates the use of pseudo-thermal light sources in QPM to overcome limitations of traditional sources, achieving high sensitivity and large FOV in single-shot imaging.

Findings

Pseudo-thermal light source matches white light in phase sensitivity.

High-speed imaging of live sperm cells demonstrated.

Large FOV imaging on placenta tissue successfully performed.

Abstract

High space-bandwidth product with high spatial phase sensitivity is indispensable for a single-shot quantitative phase microscopy (QPM) system. It opens avenue for widespread applications of QPM in the field of biomedical imaging. Temporally low coherence length light sources are generally implemented to achieve high spatial phase sensitivity in QPM at the cost of either reduced temporal resolution or smaller field of view (FOV). On the contrary, high temporal coherence light sources like lasers are capable of exploiting the full FOV of the QPM systems at the expense of less spatial phase sensitivity. In the present work, we employed pseudo-thermal light source (PTLS) in QPM which overcomes the limitations of conventional light sources. The capabilities of PTLS over conventional light sources are systematically studied and demonstrated on various test objects like USAF resolution chart and thin optical waveguide (height ~ 8 nm). The spatial phase sensitivity of QPM in case of PTLS is measured to be equivalent to that for white light source. The high-speed and large FOV capabilities of PTLS based QPM is demonstrated by high-speed imaging of live sperm cells that is limited by the camera speed and by imaging extra-ordinary large FOV phase imaging on histopathology placenta tissue samples.