Quantitative interferometric microscopic flow cytometer with expanded principal component analysis method

Abstract

Quantitative interferometric microscopy is used in biological and medical fields and a wealth of applications are proposed in order to detect different kinds of biological samples. Here, we develop a phase detecting cytometer based on quantitative interferometric microscopy with expanded principal component analysis phase retrieval method to obtain phase distributions of red blood cells with a spatial resolution ~1.5 μm. Since expanded principal component analysis method is a time-domain phase retrieval algorithm, it could avoid disadvantages of traditional frequency-domain algorithms. Additionally, the phase retrieval method realizes high-speed phase imaging from multiple microscopic interferograms captured by CCD camera when the biological cells are scanned in the field of view. We believe this method can be a powerful tool to quantitatively measure the phase distributions of different biological samples in biological and medical fields.