Visualizing the fine structure and dynamics of living cells with time-lapse polychromatic digital holographic microscopy

Polychromatic digital holographic microscopy (P-DHM) has demonstrated its capacity to generate highly denoised optical path difference images, thereby enabling the label-free visualization of fine cellular structures, such as the dendritic arborization within neuronal cells in culture. So far, however, the sample must remain more or less stationary since P-DHM is performed manually, i.e., all actions are carried out sequentially over several minutes. In this paper, we propose fully automated, robust, and efficient management of the acquisition and reconstruction of the time series of polychromatic hologram sets, transforming P-DHM into temporal P-DHM. Experimental results have demonstrated the ability of the proposed temporal P-DHM implementation to non-invasively and quantitatively reveal the fine structure and dynamics of living cells.