Multi-wavelength, handheld laser speckle imaging for skin evaluation.

OBJECTIVE: A handheld device was developed and qualified for in vivo human skin evaluation using laser speckle imaging technology. METHODS: Each laser speckle device prototype allows the choice of up to three different laser wavelengths in the range of 400 nm to 800 nm in total. Speckle pattern analysis gives various speckle parameters, for example, speckle contrast, speckle size, speckle modulation or fractal dimension. The developed laser speckle device prototypes were evaluated investigating three skin issues. RESULTS: We receive reproducible results from the speckle imaging device. For skin ageing, we found significant changes within three age groups. The effect of a methyl nicotinate treatment was clearly visible and quantifiable using a moorFLPI device as well as our speckle imaging device. In terms of basal cell carcinoma diagnosis, we found significant differences between normal and diseased skin, even though the number of samples was limited. CONCLUSION: As shown with first application examples, it was possible to demonstrate the potential of the method for skin evaluation in vivo.

Lens-free inline holographic microscopy with numerical correction of layers with different refractive index.

Digital inline holographic microscopy is applied for lens-free imaging with high lateral resolution. Microfluidic chambers for the imaging of cells in water-like or native solutions, e.g., thick layers of glass and other materials with different refractive index, cause aberrations that limit the spatial resolution and change the magnification scale. In this Letter, a fast reconstruction technique considering parallel layer systems of different refractive indices is presented. In the experiments, properly scaled images of microbeads and red human blood cells with an optical resolution corresponding to a numerical aperture of about 0.62 were reconstructed.

Self-calibrating lensless inline-holographic microscopy by a sample holder with reference structures.

A self-calibration technique for lensless compact chip-microscopes based on inline holography with pinhole illumination is presented. The pinhole illumination wave acts as reference and is needed for the reconstruction process. This reference wave is assumed to be spherical, so that its phase is already determined by the position of the pinhole in relation to the image sensor. It is shown that the reconstructed spatial resolution is strongly dependent on the estimation for the pinhole to sensor distance. A precision in the range of tens of microns was reached for microscopic imaging with a spatial resolution in the range of one micron. Therefore additional reference crosses are prepared lithographically on the sample holder. The hologram, which contains the optical information about the sample as well as the reference crosses, is used for calibration and image reconstruction at the same time. The presented technique was tested to allow the reconstruction of a spatial resolution corresponding to the limit of detection apertures of about 0.66. The technique was applied to holograms of test beads and blood smear samples.

Phase shifting technique for extended inline holographic microscopy with a pinhole array.

Digital inline holographic microscopy using a pinhole for sample illumination allows lensless imaging. To overcome restrictions of the sample size and density in the setup additional reference waves are generated by extending the single pinhole to a regular 2D pinhole array illumination. A technique is presented that uses phase shifting between the pinhole waves. Multiple foci with stable phase differences and a phase error (rms) of 0.027 rad generate pinhole waves which illuminate an undiluted, dense blood smear sample. Amplitude and phase images of the blood sample were successfully reconstructed.

High resolution (NA = 0.8) in lensless in-line holographic microscopy with glass sample carriers.

For lensless digital in-line holographic microscopy a new state-of-the-art spatial resolution corresponding to an NA of 0.8 is shown based on the tile superposition propagation. The result is proved using a common glass sample carrier with a refraction index of 1.52. Single-shot high-resolution imaging is possible by suppression of coherent reflections in an optimized arrangement using partially coherent laser light illumination.

Packed domain Rayleigh-Sommerfeld wavefield propagation for large targets.

For applications in the domain of digital holographic microscopy, we present a fast algorithm to propagate scalar wave fields from a small source area to an extended, parallel target area of coarser sampling pitch, using the first Rayleigh-Sommerfeld diffraction formula. Our algorithm can take full advantage of the fast Fourier transform by decomposing the convolution kernel of the propagation into several convolution kernel patches. Using partial overlapping of the patches together with a soft blending function, the Fourier spectrum of these patches can be reduced to a low number of significant components, which can be stored in a compact sparse array structure. This allows for rapid evaluation of the partial convolution results by skipping over negligible components through the Fourier domain pointwise multiplication and direct mapping of the remaining multiplication results into a Fourier domain representation of the coarsly sampled target patch. The algorithm has been verified experimentally at a numerical aperture of 0.62, not showing any significant resolution limitations.