Dong, J., Yetisen, A.K., Dong, C., Brändle, F., Wang, Q., Jakobi, M., Saur, D., Koch, A.W. (2021). ASC Photonics.
DOI:10.1021/acsphotonics.1c01124
High-throughput microscopic imaging is highly desirable in biomedical applications. Advances in computational microscopy have achieved high space-bandwidth products and even permitted gigapixel imaging in a stepwise fashion, yet temporal resolution remains challenging for investigating live-sample dynamics. Here, we report multibeam array interferometric microscopy (MAIM) for a single-shot high space-bandwidth product. The MAIM method overcomes the limitations of conventional digital holographic microscopy, providing complex field reconstruction with a maximum 5-fold field of view (FOV) increase in a single camera acquisition, while maintaining sub-nanometer optical path-length stability. This is achieved by integrating common-path holographic microscopy, multibeam interference technology, and holographic multiplexing technology. The temporal resolving power of MAIM is significantly higher than that of computational illumination microscopy. MAIM has major advantages over previous holographic multiplexing techniques in that it integrates more wavefronts and offers high temporal stability. The fundamentals of MAIM are analyzed theoretically. As a demonstration, we build MAIM prototypes to increase the FOV by factors of 5, 4, and 3, respectively. We present proof-of-concept MAIM imaging results of both natural and artificial samples and show biomedical applications such as monitoring sub-cellular dynamical phenomena in flowing live erythrocytes in vitro and label-free microrefractometry imaging of unstained cancer tissue slices. MAIM gives rise to (ultra)fast or long-term (time-lapse) imaging of nanoscale dynamics of unstained live samples in vitro with a high throughput.
