Spectral Light Interference Microscopy (SLIM) Using Twisted Nematic Liquid Crystals: Hardware and Software Implemetations

Abstract

In light microscopy experiments the information concerning the phase is lost upon recording intensity images. The phase information often contains valuable information on the studied specimen. Spatial Light Interference Microscopy (SLIM) is a powerful imaging method that captures the phase fluctuation across the specimen. This information contains useful information of the imaging target (e.g. morphological thickness, refractive index, dry mass etc.). This thesis focuses on improving the efficiency and compactness of the conventional reflective SLIM setup by building a unified hardware and software solution. On the hardware side, we proposed to use the transmission-based equipment called a spatial light modulator (SLM) based on a twisted nematic crystal display to reduce the overall size and made other necessary changes. On the software side, we integrated different software modules in a common framework to increase consistency and stability. We demonstrate that our system is fully automatic from image acquisition, phase calculation and visualization.