Multimodal phase imaging reveals the distinct layers of retina and enables lesion detection

Quantitative phase imaging (QPI) has been widely used to retrieve spatial information of samples from the fields of biology, materials science, fluid mechanics, etc. The rapid development of virtual staining technology has raised the needs of QPI for tissue sections. Interferometric and non-interferometric quantitative phase reconstruction methods are two major branches of QPI. Owing to its characteristics of non-contact and label-free, phase imaging can be performed for transparent and translucent samples. In this work, we applied interference-based digital holographic microscopy and AIKK microscopy based on non-interference to perform phase imaging for the tissue sample of mice retina. And AIKK microscopy based on complementary illumination is introduce to reduce the exposure times. Here, AIKK microscopy with 10x microscopic objective can achieve the same resolution as digital holographic microscopy with 20x microscopic objective, the multi-layers structure of the retina can be distinguished by phase imaging without staining.