Coherent optical tomographic microscope

A new microscopic procedure for imaging three-dimensional semitransparent specimens with coherent illumination is described. The procedure employs multiple 'views' of the specimen, obtained by illumination via monochromatic plane waves having different directions of propagation, to generate a high quality image of the three-dimensional complex index of refraction profile of the specimen using the reconstruction algorithms of diffraction tomography (DT). The theory and hardware implementation of such a 'tomographic' microscope are described and the concept is compared to conventional optical microscopy, confocal scanning microscopy, and to other tomographic based optical microscopic concepts that have been employed in the past.