Experimental examination of the quantitative imaging properties of optical diffraction tomography

Optical diffraction tomography (ODT) is examined experimentally by reconstruction of a cross section of a transparent, cylindrical object with known geometry and refractive index. The object is immersed in three liquids of different refractive index to produce varying degrees of weak scattering. In each case the reconstructed size, shape, and refractive index are in good agreement with the known characteristics. This shows that quantitative images of transparent, cylindrical objects can be obtained by ODT. The images obtained from experimental data were also shown to be in good agreement with those obtained from computer-simulated data, thus verifying our computer simulations.