Assessment of tissues’ inhomogeneous optical properties based on a portable microscope under partially coherent illumination

Abstract Assessing tissues’ inhomogeneous optical properties is helpful for diagnosis, but high-cost measurement and experimental setups limit its development, data collecting and applications. In this paper, a portable microscope is proposed to assess the inhomogeneous optical properties of the sample. In the single LED illumination mode, accurate quantitative phase (QP) map can be recovered from 5 intensity images captured at different axial positions. Then based on the scattering-phase theorem and statistical dispersion relation (SDR), the inhomogeneous optical properties of the sample can be quantitatively assessed from these QP maps. In the incoherent dark field illumination mode, strong scattering structures can be observed easily without post processing. An improved resolution comparing with bright field imaging and qualitative optical properties would be obtained. In contrast to DHM and SLIM, our setup is cost-effective, use-flexible, and with a small amount of data acquisition, thus having the potential to promote the development of assessing tissues’ inhomogeneous optical properties, especially in resource-limited areas.