Digital holography-based phase postprocessing and cell three-dimensional morphology analysis system

Abstract

Digital holography microscopy (DHM), as a non-phototoxic non-destructive imaging technique, encodes a complex optical field into intensity modulations by the interference of scattered sample wave and reference wave and performs quantitative analysis of wave-matter interactions by decoding phase delay from a hologram. In this work, we propose a complete high-precision high-robust DHM-based quantitative phase microanalysis scheme (DHM-QPMS) for living cells. The whole scheme provides algorithmic support for 3D morphological information on cell area, circumference, irregularity, and volume. We quantitatively validated this scheme for the human cervical cancer (HeLa) cells under a ×20/0.45NA objective lens. Though the used sample is adherent and bizarre, the system can still achieve accurate target identification and cellular 3D feature extraction. Moreover, we believe that DHM-QPMS will be an important research tool for biological researchers.