Spatial light interference microscopy (SLIM)

Quantitative estimate of fs-laser induced refractive index changes in the bulk of various transparent materials

“…13, the alignment of the optical elements is critical. From a practical point of view, we gained much flexibility by reconstructing the original phase-contrast microscope on an optical table.…”

“…9 The illumination is broadband (an halogen lamp for instance). The amount of processing necessary to retrieve the quantitative phase is very reduced, and does not require calculating derivatives.…”

Phase microscopy using light-field reconstruction method for cell observation

“…Moreover, a clear refractive index (RI) distribution is vital for representing the biomedical features of a cell (Choi et al, 2007(Choi et al, , 2010Popescu et al, 2008). Multiple phase microscopy techniques have been developed and have proven quite useful in this regard, such as differential interference contrast (DIC) microscopy (Allen et al, 1981), phase contrast microscopy (Burch and Stock, 1942), Fourier phase microscopy (FPM) (Popescu et al, 2004) and spatial light interference microscopy (SLIM) (Wang et al, 2011). All of these techniques use the partial light-field interference method to obtain higher-contrast images, but these phase images are neither quantitatively equal nor proportional to the RI.…”

Measurement of refractive index distribution of biotissues by scanning focused refractive index microscopy

“…Recently, many label-free techniques have been developed and applied to quantitatively map the RI images. Towards this end, a main approach is to quantitatively retrieve the optical path length information across the specimen, including phase contrast microscopy 4 , dual-interference-channel quantitative-phase microscopy 5 , optical coherence tomography 6 (OCT), digital holographic microscopy [7][8][9] , tomographic phase microscopy 10 and spatial light interference microscopy 2,11 . The techniques measure the phase shift information which depends on both the RI and the thickness of the specimen by detecting the transmission light, and therefore can be concluded as quantitative phase imaging (QPI) methods.…”