Fourier-domain holography in photorefractive quantum-well films

Live tissue viability and chemosensitivity assays using digital holographic motility contrast imaging

Holographic optical coherence imaging is an en face form of optical coherence tomography that uses low-coherence digital holography as a coherence gate to select light from a chosen depth inside scattering tissue. By acquiring successive holograms at a high camera frame rate at a fixed depth, dynamic speckle provides information concerning dynamic light scattering from intracellular motility. Motility contrast imaging (MCI) uses living motion as a label-free and functional biomarker. MCI provides a new form of viability assay and also is applicable for proliferation and cytotoxicity assays. The results presented here demonstrate that low-coherence digital holography can extract viability information from biologically relevant three-dimensional (3D) tissue based on multicellular tumor spheroids by moving beyond the format of two-dimensional cell culture used for conventional high-content analysis. This paper also demonstrates the use of MCI for chemosensitivity assays on tumor exgrafts of excised ovarian cancer tumors responding to standard-of-care cisplatin chemotherapy. This ex vivo application extends the applicability of MCI beyond 3D tissue culture grown in vitro.

Tissue dynamics spectroscopy for phenotypic profiling of drug effects in three-dimensional culture

Coherence-gated dynamic light scattering captures cellular dynamics through ultra-low-frequency (0.005-5 Hz) speckle fluctuations and Doppler shifts that encode a broad range of cellular and subcellular motions. The dynamic physiological response of tissues to applied drugs is the basis for a new type of phenotypic profiling for drug screening on multicellular tumor spheroids. Volumetrically resolved tissue-response fluctuation spectrograms act as fingerprints that are segmented through feature masks into high-dimensional feature vectors. Drug-response clustering is achieved through multidimensional scaling with simulated annealing to construct phenotypic drug profiles that cluster drugs with similar responses. Hypoxic vs. normoxic tissue responses present two distinct phenotypes with differentiated responses to environmental perturbations and to pharmacological doses.

Three-dimensional holographic imaging of living tissue using a highly sensitive photorefractive polymer device

Photorefractive materials are dynamic holographic storage media that are highly sensitive to coherent light fields and relatively insensitive to a uniform light background. This can be exploited to effectively separate ballistic light from multiply-scattered light when imaging through turbid media. We developed a highly sensitive photorefractive polymer composite and incorporated it into a holographic optical coherence imaging system. This approach combines the advantages of coherence-domain imaging with the benefits of holography to form a high-speed wide-field imaging technique. By using coherence-gated holography, image-bearing ballistic light can be captured in real-time without computed tomography. We analyzed the implications of Fourier-domain and image-domain holography on the field of view and image resolution for a transmission recording geometry, and demonstrate holographic depth-resolved imaging of tumor spheroids with 12 microm axial and 10 microm lateral resolution, achieving a data acquisition speed of 8 x 10(5) voxels/s.

Fourier-domain digital holographic optical coherence imaging of living tissue

Digital holographic optical coherence imaging is a full-frame coherence-gated imaging approach that uses a CCD camera to record and reconstruct digital holograms from living tissue. Recording digital holograms at the optical Fourier plane has advantages for diffuse targets compared with Fresnel off-axis digital holography. A digital hologram captured at the Fourier plane requires only a 2D fast Fourier transform for numerical reconstruction. We have applied this technique for the depth-resolved imaging of rat osteogenic tumor multicellular spheroids and acquired cross-section images of the anterior segment and the retinal region of a mouse eye. A penetration depth of 1.4 mm for the tumor spheroids was achieved.

Fourier-domain holographic optical coherence imaging of tumor spheroids and mouse eye

Fourier-domain holography (FDH) has several advantages over image-domain holography for optical coherence imaging of tissue. Writing the hologram in the Fourier plane significantly reduces background arising from reference light scattered from the photorefractive holographic film. The ability to use FDH is enhanced by the use of a diffuse target, such as scattering tissue, rather than specular targets, because the broader angular distribution from diffuse targets is transformed into a relatively uniform distribution in the Fourier plane. We demonstrate significantly improved performance for Fourier-domain optical coherence imaging on rat osteogenic sarcoma tumor spheroids and mouse eye. The sensitivity is documented at -95 dB.