Abstract
Phase contrast imaging is widely employed in the physical, biological, and medical sciences. However, typical implementations involve complex imaging systems that amount to in-line interferometers. We adapt differential phase contrast (DPC) to a dual-phone illumination-imaging system to obtain phase contrast images on a portable mobile phone platform. In this dual phone differential phase contrast (dpDPC) microscope, semicircles are projected sequentially on the display of one phone, and images are captured using a low-cost, short focal length lens attached to the second phone. By numerically combining images obtained using these semicircle patterns, high quality DPC images with ≈ 2 micrometer resolution can be easily acquired with no specialized hardware, circuitry, or instrument control programs.
Highlights
In bright-field microscopy, when imaging pigmented or amplitude samples, the contrast in the resulting images is created due to greater light absorption in the denser regions of the sample, leading to absorption-based optical contrast
While classical phase contrast (PC) microscopy requires the addition of annular illumination and conjugate phase rings in the back aperture of the objective, differential interference contrast microscopy [2,3] requires the use of polarizers and prisms to be able to further highlight small differences in the refractive index within different parts of the sample
We demonstrate the ability of our multi-modal dual-phone illumination-imaging microscopy system [34] to perform differential phase microscopy
Summary
In bright-field microscopy, when imaging pigmented or amplitude samples, the contrast in the resulting images is created due to greater light absorption in the denser regions of the sample, leading to absorption-based optical contrast. Compared with prior systems [30,31], our dual phone DPC (dpDPC) system is more compact and portable, but the use of a phone screen with densely packed RGB LEDs for illumination instead of an LED array or LCD allows for complex spatial patterns, intensity gradation, and color generation, as well as more pattern options to be explored. These benefits are all obtained without requiring specialized control software or utilizing complex electrical wiring. Our system obtains good quality phase contrast images, with resolutions below 2 micrometers, of a wide variety of samples, including polystyrene beads, blood smears, and cell cultures
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