Single-shot slightly-off-axis interferometry based Hilbert phase microscopy of red blood cells.

A slightly-off-axis interferometry based Hilbert phase microscopy (HPM) method is developed to quantitatively obtain the phase distribution. Owing to its single-shot nature and details detection ability, HPM can be used to investigate rapid phenomena that take place in transparent structures such as biological cells. Moreover, the slightly-off-axis interferometry owns higher effective bandwidth and more sensitivity than traditional off-axis interferometry. The proposed method takes advantages of the above techniques to obtain the phase image of the red blood cells and compared with the traditional off-axis interferometry and phase retrieval algorithm based on the FFT. The experimental results show that the proposed method owns fine spatial details and real-time imaging ability. We are sure that the proposed method provides a breakthrough for real-time observing and quantitative analyzing of cells in vivo.