3D reconstruction of weakly scattering objects from 2D intensity-only measurements using the Wolf transform

Abstract

A new approach to optical diffraction tomography (ODT) based on intensity measurements is presented. By applying the Wolf transform directly to intensity measurements, we observed unexpected behavior in the 3D reconstruction of the sample. Such a reconstruction does not explicitly represent a quantitative measure of the refractive index of the sample; however, it contains interesting qualitative information. This 3D reconstruction exhibits edge enhancement and contrast enhancement for nanostructures compared with the conventional 3D refractive index reconstruction and thus could be used to localize nanoparticles such as lipids inside a biological sample.