Tensorial tomographic Fourier Ptychography with applications to muscle tissue imaging

TL;DR

Tensorial tomographic Fourier Ptychography (ToFu) is a novel non-invasive microscopy technique that captures 3D anisotropic tissue structures and polarization properties without scanning, enabling detailed muscle and heart tissue imaging.

Contribution

We introduce ToFu, a new Fourier Ptychography-based method that recovers 3D permittivity tensors and polarization information from polarized intensity measurements, advancing label-free tissue imaging.

Findings

Successfully reconstructed 3D muscle fiber structures with high resolution.

Demonstrated detection of cardiac amyloidosis through polarization imaging.

Achieved accurate morphological measurements comparable to established microscopy methods.

Abstract

We report Tensorial tomographic Fourier Ptychography (ToFu), a new non-scanning label-free tomographic microscopy method for simultaneous imaging of quantitative phase and anisotropic specimen information in 3D. Built upon Fourier Ptychography, a quantitative phase imaging technique, ToFu additionally highlights the vectorial nature of light. The imaging setup consists of a standard microscope equipped with an LED matrix, a polarization generator, and a polarization-sensitive camera. Permittivity tensors of anisotropic samples are computationally recovered from polarized intensity measurements across three dimensions. We demonstrate ToFu's efficiency through volumetric reconstructions of refractive index, birefringence, and orientation for various validation samples, as well as tissue samples from muscle fibers and diseased heart tissue. Our reconstructions of muscle fibers resolve their 3D fine-filament structure and yield consistent morphological measurements compared to gold-standard second harmonic generation scanning confocal microscope images found in the literature. Additionally, we demonstrate reconstructions of a heart tissue sample that carries important polarization information for detecting cardiac amyloidosis.