Tomographic phase microscopy using optical tweezers

We review our technique for tomographic phase microscopy with optical tweezers [1]. This tomographic phase microscopy approach enables full 3-D refractive-index reconstruction. Tomographic phase microscopy measures quantitatively the 3-D distribution of refractive-index in biological cells. We integrated our external interferometric module with holographic optical tweezers for obtaining quantitative phase maps of biological samples from a wide range of angles. The close-to-common-path, off-axis interferometric system enables a full-rotation tomographic acquisition of a single cell using holographic optical tweezers for trapping and manipulating with a desired array of traps, while acquiring phase information of a single cell from all different angles and maintaining the native surrounding medium. We experimentally demonstrated two reconstruction algorithms: the filtered back-projection method and the Fourier diffraction method for 3-D refractive index imaging of yeast cells.