Isotropic quantitative differential phase contrast microscopy using radially asymmetric color-encoded pupil

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Differential phase contrast (DPC) microscopy provides isotropic phase images by applying asymmetric illumination patterns on the sample. The movement of specimens during series image acquisition may lead to motion blur artifacts, which are difficult to prevent. Here, we propose a new method based on pupil engineering and color multiplexing to obtain an isotropic phase transfer function and to reduce the required frames simultaneously. Radially asymmetric color pupils are implemented in a DPC microscope using a programmable thin-film transistor as a digital pupil, which gives flexibility and dynamic control for projecting illumination patterns on samples. With our approach, an isotropic quantitative phase map can be obtained using only pairwise color images for phase reconstruction. A radially asymmetric color pupil is synthesized by encoding the red, green, and blue colors. To recover accurate phase values, a color-leakage correction algorithm is applied to calibrate each color channel. Compared to a half-circle illumination pupil, our method can significantly enhance the image acquisition speed. The phase recovery accuracy is more than 97%. To show the imaging performance of our proposed method, quantitative phase imaging of living 3T3 mouse fibroblast cells is performed. Our quantitative phase measurement method may find important applications in biomedical research.