Quantitative differential phase contrast (DPC) microscopy with computational aberration correction.

Differential Phase Contrast (DPC) microscopy is a practical method for recovering quantitative phase from intensity images captured with different source patterns in an LED array microscope. Being a partially coherent imaging method, DPC does not suffer from speckle artifacts and achieves 2× better resolution than coherent methods. Like all imaging systems, however, DPC is susceptible to aberrations. Here, we propose a method of algorithmic self-calibration for DPC where we simultaneously recover the complex-field of the sample and the spatially-variant aberrations of the system, using 4 images with different illumination source patterns. The resulting phase reconstructions are digitally aberration-corrected.