Pushing microscopy beyond standard limits

Thursday, August 1st, 2013

Engineers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) are pushing microscopy beyond standard limits:

“One big advantage of this new approach is the hardware compatibility,” Zheng says, “You only need to add an LED array to an existing microscope. No other hardware modification is needed. The rest of the job is done by the computer.”

The new system acquires about 150 low-resolution images of a sample. Each image corresponds to one LED element in the LED array. Therefore, in the various images, light coming from known different directions illuminates the sample. A novel computational approach, termed Fourier ptychographic microscopy (FPM), is then used to stitch together these low-resolution images to form the high-resolution intensity and phase information of the sample — a much more complete picture of the entire light field of the sample.

FPM Microscope

Yang explains that when we look at light from an object, we are only able to sense variations in intensity. But light varies in terms of both its intensity and its phase, which is related to the angle at which light is traveling.

“What this project has developed is a means of taking low-resolution images and managing to tease out both the intensity and the phase of the light field of the target sample,” Yang says. “Using that information, you can actually correct for optical aberration issues that otherwise confound your ability to resolve objects well.”

The very large field of view that the new system can image could be particularly useful for digital pathology applications, where the typical process of using a microscope to scan the entirety of a sample can take tens of minutes. Using FPM, a microscope does not need to scan over the various parts of a sample — the whole thing can be imaged all at once. Furthermore, because the system acquires a complete set of data about the light field, it can computationally correct errors — such as out-of-focus images — so samples do not need to be rescanned.

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