Coherent label-free imaging through turbidity: a holographic approach

A challenging issue has to be faced in microscopy whenever samples are immersed inside a dynamic turbid medium, as occluding objects provoke severe light scattering or unpredictable time-variable phase delays that scramble the object information. In these cases, the transmission matrix of the medium cannot be fully characterized. Here we show a simple technique, named Multi-Look Digital Holography (MLDH), able to fully recover the useful signal of biological specimens dipped inside a turbid liquid phase. Multiple hologram recordings are incoherently combined to synthesize the whole complex field diffused by the sample, which is revealed through turbidity providing quantitative phase-contrast information. Moreover, we show that the presence of a turbid medium can have a positive effect on a coherent imaging system, helping to reduce the effect of speckle artifacts. In other words, occluding biological elements, like e.g. Red Blood Cells (RBCs), can be thought as useful optical components providing denoising capabilities.