Abstract
Unlike most optical coherence microscopy (OCM) systems, dynamic speckle-field interferometric microscopy (DSIM) achieves depth sectioning through the spatial-coherence gating effect. Under high numerical aperture (NA) speckle-field illumination, our previous experiments have demonstrated less than 1 μm depth resolution in reflection-mode DSIM, while doubling the diffraction limited resolution as under structured illumination. However, there has not been a physical model to rigorously describe the speckle imaging process, in particular explaining the sectioning effect under high illumination and imaging NA settings in DSIM. In this paper, we develop such a model based on the diffraction tomography theory and the speckle statistics. Using this model, we calculate the system response function, which is used to further obtain the depth resolution limit in reflection-mode DSIM. Theoretically calculated depth resolution limit is in an excellent agreement with experiment results. We envision that our physical model will not only help in understanding the imaging process in DSIM, but also enable better designing such systems for depth-resolved measurements in biological cells and tissues.
Highlights
Depth selectivity, or the so-called sectioning effect, is important in optical imaging of microscopic objects that have complex 3D features [1,2,3]
Sheppard and his colleagues have pioneered the development of 3D coherent transfer function (CTF) method to help understand the optical sectioning effect in scanning confocal microscopy (SCM) systems [16,17]
We have extended the diffraction tomography theory to dynamic specklefield interferometric microscopy or dynamic speckle-field interferometric microscopy (DSIM)
Summary
The so-called sectioning effect, is important in optical imaging of microscopic objects that have complex 3D features [1,2,3]. Through solving the inverse scattering problem with the diffraction tomography theory, accurate 3D CTF has been obtained for low temporal-coherence interferometric tomography systems, which enabled more precise 3D reconstruction with improved spatial resolution in all dimensions for tissue [29,30] and cellular imaging [31,32,33]. This highlights the importance of including the diffraction effects in coherent imaging. We verify that transmission-mode DSIM systems do not have sectioning effects for flat objects
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