Quantitative phase microscopies: accuracy comparison

TL;DR

This study compares the accuracy of eight quantitative phase microscopy techniques, highlighting their strengths and limitations in measurement precision, artefacts, and suitability for large biological samples.

Contribution

It introduces an upgraded numerical toolbox for modeling various QPM techniques and evaluates their accuracy and artefacts comprehensively.

Findings

DHM and PSI are free from artefacts but affected by coherent noise

CGM, DPC, DPM, and TIE exhibit a trade-off between precision and trueness

FPM and SLIM suffer from inherent artefacts limiting their quantitative use

Abstract

This article presents a thorough comparison of themain QPM techniques, focusing on their accuracy in terms of measurement precision and trueness. We focus on 8 techniques, namely digital holographic microscopy (DHM), cross-grating wavefront microscopy (CGM), which is based on QLSI (quadriwave lateral shearing interferometry), diffraction phase microscopy (DPM), differential phase-contrast (DPC) microscopy, phase-shifting interferometry (PSI) imaging, Fourier phase microscopy (FPM), spatial light interference microscopy (SLIM), and transport-of-intensity equation (TIE) imaging. For this purpose, we used a home-made numerical toolbox based on discrete dipole approximation (IF-DDA). This toolbox is designed to compute the electromagnetic field at the sample plane of a microscope, irrespective of the object's complexity or the illumination conditions. We upgraded this toolbox to enable it to model any type of QPM, and to take into account shot noise. In a nutshell, the results show that DHM and PSI are inherently free from artefacts and rather suffer from coherent noise; In CGM, DPC, DPM and TIE, there is a trade off between precision and trueness, which can be balanced by varying one experimental parameter; FPM and SLIM suffer from inherent artefacts that cannot be discarded experimentally in most cases, making the techniques not quantitative especially for large objects covering a large part of the field of view, such as eukaryotic cells.