Optical tomographic microscope for quantitative imaging of phase objects

An optical tomographic microscope with threedimensional quantitative imaging capability was proposed in the past as an alternative to the confocal scanning microscope.1 Although the confocal scanning microscope can form intensity images of thin slices of three-dimensional objects and thus provide quantitative information on the magnitude of the object, the tomographic microscope can reconstruct a three-dimensional distribution of the complex-valued images directly.2 This opens the possibility of image-quality improvement from a tomographic microscope through three-dimensional deconvolution, which is almost impossible with the confocal scanning microscope. In addition, it is found that the tomographic capability of the confocal microscope is poor in the bright-field transmission mode. The tomographic microscope reconstructs the object from the complex amplitude of light transmitted through the semitransparent object in different views. Hence quantitative estimation of the complex amplitude is an important aspect of realizing a tomographic microscope