Abstract
Coherent light scattered by tissues brings structural and dynamic information, at depth, that standard imaging techniques cannot reach. Dynamics of cells or sub-cellular elements can be measured thanks to dynamic light scattering in thin samples (single scattering regime) or thanks to diffusive wave spectroscopy in thick samples (diffusion regime). Here, we address the intermediate regime and provide an analytical relationship between scattered light fluctuations and the distribution of cell displacements as a function of time. We illustrate our method by characterizing cell motility inside half millimeter thick multicellular aggregates.
Highlights
In the past two decades, we have witnessed an unprecedented development of optical microscopy for biology
Dynamic light scattering relies on the hypothesis of single scattering (Born approximation)
Dynamic light scattering (DLS) and DWS, we modelled the propagation of light as corpuscular
Summary
In the past two decades, we have witnessed an unprecedented development of optical microscopy for biology. New techniques were introduced to allow optical sectioning of thick samples, including confocal and two photon microscopy [4,5], light sheet microscopy [6,7,8], optical coherence tomography [9,10,11,12] and phase conjugation [13,14]. Apart from the latter, these techniques are based on the signal carried by ballistic photons, those that have not been scattered in their path through the tissue. As the non-scattered photons decrease exponentially with the penetration depth, the signal becomes unexploitable beyond a thickness corresponding to few cells [17]
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