Partially Coherent Optical Diffraction Tomography Toward Practical Cell Study

Optical diffraction tomography (ODT) is a computational imaging technique based on refractive index (RI) contrast. Its application for microscopic imaging of weakly absorbing and scattering samples has been demonstrated by using a specially designed holographic microscope with angular scanning of the coherent sample illumination direction. Recently, an alternative low cost technique based on partially coherent sample illumination (PC-ODT), which is compatible with the conventional wide-field transmission microscope, has been established. In this case, the 3D refractive index distribution of the sample is obtained by deconvolution from a single stack of through-focus intensity images. The pe…