QUANTITATIVE PHASE IMAGING (QPI): METROLOGY MEETS BIOLOGY

Taewoo Kim Renjie Zhou Lynford L. Goddard Gabriel Popescu
IEEE Photonics Journal, Breakthroughs in Photonics, Vol. 6, No. 2 2014

Quantitative phase imaging (QPI) is an emerging optical approach that measures the optical path length of transparent specimen non-invasively. Therefore, it is suitable for studying unstained biological tissues and cells with high sensitivity and resolution. This capability of QPI has fueled itself to grow rapidly as an active field of study for the past two decades. With this trend, QPI has experienced some breakthroughs in methods and applications in the past year. We briefly review some of these breakthroughs in method, including QPI through silicon, marker-free phase nanoscopy and white-light diffraction tomography. Furthermore, some of the applications, such as quantitative phase measurement of cell growth and real-time blood testing, are introduced to show the importance and applicability of the field.