Investigation of imaging contrast in optical diffraction tomography for cell imaging

Recent advances in optical diffraction tomography (ODT) have enabled the observation of subcellular structures in living cells through mapping their three-dimensional (3D) refractive index distributions. Illumination angle-scanning based QDT can achieve around 200 nm lateral imaging resolution, however, microscopic structures smaller than 500 nm may not even be clearly observed in living cells. Therefore, we explore the factors that can influence the imaging contrast, including the number of angles used for reconstruction, sample refractive index contrast, and the size of sample features. This study will provide a guidance on optimizing ODT for achieving high contrast cell imaging.