Holographic Motility Contrast Imaging of Live Tissues

Motility contrast imaging uses internal motions of cells and tissues as an endogenous imaging contrast agent. The motion is captured inside live three-dimensional tissues using low-coherence digital holography. Speckle holography provides a coherence gate to select light from a chosen depth inside multicellular tumor spheroids. The motions of organelles and the cell membranes cause dynamic light scattering and phase and amplitude fluctuations in the recorded speckle fields. Tissue dynamics spectroscopy is based on fluctuation analysis performed on the time-dependent speckle to separate different types of motion within differential drug response spectrograms. The application of this technique to assess the effects of drug on live tissue is demonstrated.