Transport of intensity diffraction tomography with non-interferometric synthetic aperture

We present a new label-free three-dimensional (3D) microscopy technique, termed transport of intensity diffraction tomography with non-interferometric synthetic aperture (TIDT-NSA). Without resorting to interferometric detection, TIDT-NSA retrieves the 3D refractive index (RI) distribution of biological specimens from 3D intensity-only measurements at various illumination angles based on an off-the-shelf bright-field microscope with a programmable light-emitting-diode (LED) illumination source, allowing incoherent-diffraction-limited quantitative 3D phase-contrast imaging.