Label-free coherent microscopy through blood by digital holography

Digital Holography (DH) numerical methods have been developed to allow imaging through turbid media. DH is a wide used imaging technique as it provides non-invasive quantitative phase-contrast mapping as well as flexible numerical refocusing of samples acquired in lens-based or lensless conditions. However, a challenging issue has to be faced when the samples are immersed inside a dynamic turbid medium, as biological occluding objects out of interest provoke severe light scattering or unpredictable time-variable phase delays which scramble the object information, so that in many cases the sample is not visible at all. Here we show a simple technique, named Multi-Look Digital Holography (MLDH), able to fully recover the useful signal of the specimen of interest dipped inside the turbid liquid phase. Multiple hologram recordings are incoherently combined to synthesize the whole complex field carrying the useful information, thus revealing the hidden objects. In particular, it will be shown that both amplitude imaging and phase-contrast mapping of cells hidden behind a flow of Red Blood Cells can be obtained. Besides, qualitative comparison and quantitative evaluation show a remarkable improvement with respect to the image captured when the cells were immersed in a transparent medium. In other words, the RBCs have been demonstrated to accomplish an optical task, acting as a speckle noise de-correlation device.