Biomedical cellular imaging using digital holographic photothermal microscope

• Main Author: Hendry Renaldo.
• Other Authors: Ng Beng Koon
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2011
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Electrical and electronic engineering::Optics, optoelectronics, photonics
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/45569
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Biomedical imaging is one of the most essential tools in the medical world today. It is the main application utilized for providing early and accurate information about abnormalities occurring in the body leading to cancer and other diseases. The current available imaging modalities up till today nevertheless, has yet to provide a decent method of imaging at the cellular and organelle level where diseases or cancer may arise. Photothermal Imaging (PTI) comes as an innovative means of imaging real-time, unlabelled cellular structure with resolution exceeding the diffraction limit. The method is based on irradiating a cellular structure with a laser pump beam and using a probe beam to measure the optical path difference resulted from the heat distribution of the structure to the surroundings. On the other edge of diagnostic technology, the rapid advancement of image capturing and computational technology has led to the possibility of another imaging modality called Digital Holographic Microscopy (DHM). The technique is based on recording the interference between two laser beams, namely the object beam and the reference beam with a Charged Coupled Device (CCD) camera and numerically reconstructing the interference result (hologram) with a computer of sufficient speed. As Digital Holographic Microscopy requires more efficient equipments for the same imaging resolution and offers more quantitative measurement advantages than its previous alternative techniques, the integration between these two imaging techniques has become a new interesting research field to be studied upon. Since the past few years, a breakthrough attempt in incorporating DHM into PTI has been conducted and till recently, our PTI-DHM setup has been established. Therefore, this Final Year Project focuses on enhancing the current system in order to build a robust PTI-DHM setup. It is then followed by developing the numerical reconstruction software for the system and finally obtaining of PTI image successfully using the setup.