High-throughput 3D imaging with compressive lens-free tomography

Abstract

We report a fast and effective lens-free imaging platform for optical diffraction tomography (ODT). Using single wavelength illumination from only 4 angular directions and a lensless inline holographic imaging setup to directly capture the resulting diffraction patterns, our method can reconstruct high quality 3D images of biological samples at micron-scale resolution across a cubic-millimeter-level volume with a compact, scalable and inexpensive system. To achieve this, we developed a compressive tomographic reconstruction algorithm to solve the inverse problem of lens-free ODT by combining Wirtinger derivatives and primal-dual splitting. This fast and inexpensive lens-free tomographic microscopy system provides a promising 3D imaging approach for high throughput biomedical applications.