Low-coherence optical diffraction tomography using a ferroelectric liquid crystal spatial light modulator.

Chansuk Park,Yongkeun Park,Kyeoreh Lee,Yoonseok Baek

doi:10.1364/oe.405418

Abstract

Optical diffraction tomography (ODT) is a three-dimensional (3D) label-free imaging technique. The 3D refractive index distribution of a sample can be reconstructed from multiple two-dimensional optical field images via ODT. Herein, we introduce a temporally low-coherence ODT technique using a ferroelectric liquid crystal spatial light modulator (FLC SLM). The fast binary-phase modulation provided by the FLC SLM ensures the high spatiotemporal resolution. To reduce coherent noise, a superluminescent light-emitting diode is used as an economic low-coherence light source. We demonstrate the performance of the proposed system using various samples, including colloidal microspheres and live epithelial cells.

Highlights

Optical diffraction tomography (ODT) is a three-dimensional (3D) label-free quantitative phase imaging technique [1, 2]
Because ODT enables the observation of intact biological samples in a noninvasive and quantitative manner, it has been actively utilized in various fields, including cell biology [3,4,5], immunology [6], pharmacology [7], biotechnology [8], and nanotechnology [9]
Suppression of coherent noise in ODT To verify the suppression of coherent noise, we compared the measured 3D refractive index (RI) tomograms obtained using the proposed method with the tomograms obtained using conventional ODT with a highly coherent light source

Summary

Introduction

Optical diffraction tomography (ODT) is a three-dimensional (3D) label-free quantitative phase imaging technique [1, 2]. The 3D refractive index (RI) distribution of a sample can be reconstructed from multiple two-dimensional (2D) optical field images via ODT. To this end, an inverse scattering problem based on either the first-order Born or Rytov approximations has to be solved. In ODT, the 3D RI distribution is reconstructed from multiple 2D optical field images containing both the amplitude and phase information of the sample [6]. Multiple 2D optical field images can be obtained by rotating the sample [10, 11] or scanning the sample axially [12,13,14,15], or by angle scanning of an illumination beam [16,17,18]

Methods

Results

Conclusion