Multi-dimensional Imaging

Chapter 6Advanced Digital Holographic Microscopy for Life Science Applications

Frank Dubois, Ahmed El Mallahi, Christophe Minetti and Catherine Yourassowsky

Microgravity Research Centre, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium

6.1 Introduction

A digital holographic microscope (DHM) is a powerful tool for recording full interferometric information of objects. It provides the capability to record sequences of holograms of dynamic phenomena at high rates and with short exposure times. The analyses are based on the digital holographic refocusing of both the optical intensities and quantitative optical phase maps. In this chapter, we present the developments we have realized on these instrumentations and holographic information processing. Our instrumental developments are based on the use of optical illumination sources of reduced coherences in order to improve the optical quality of the both phase maps and intensities. Although the reduction of the spatial coherence is most significant with a transmission DHM, the reduction in temporal coherence is also relevant to reducing the noise with high scattering samples. In this way, we recently developed a microscope with multi-wavelength sources of both spatial and temporal reduced coherences enabling one-shot recording. The DHM configurations are detailed in Section 6.2. The processing of holograms has been developed in several applications. In Sections 6.3 and 6.4, they are illustrated in water monitoring and the study of dynamical ...