Lab on chip optical imaging of biological sample by quantitative phase microscopy

Quantitative imaging and three dimensional (3D) morphometric analysis of flowing and not-adherent cells is an important aspect for diagnostic purposes at Lab on Chip scale. Diagnostics tools need to be quantitative, label-free and, as much as possible, accurate. In recent years digital holography (DH) has been improved to be considered as suitable diagnostic method in several research field. In this paper we demonstrate that DH can be used for retrieving 3D morphometric data for sorting and diagnosis aims. Several techniques exist for 3D morphological study as optical coherent tomography and confocal microscopy, but they are not the best choice in case of dynamic events as flowing samples. Recently, a DH approach, based on shape from silhouette algorithm (SFS), has been developed for 3D shape display and calculation of cells biovolume. Such approach, adopted in combination with holographic optical tweezers (HOT) was successfully applied to cells with convex shape. Unfortunately, it’s limited to cells with convex surface as sperm cells or diatoms. Here, we demonstrate an improvement of such procedure. By decoupling thickness information from refractive index ones and combining this with SFS analysis, 3D shape of concave cells is obtained. Specifically, the topography contour map is computed and used to adjust the 3D shape retrieved by the SFS algorithm. We prove the new procedure for healthy red blood cells having a concave surface in their central region. Experimental results are compared with theoretical model.