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

Being a partially coherent imaging method, DPC does not suffer from speckle artifacts and achieves 2x 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 a combination of partially coherent and coherent illumination. The resulting phase reconstructions are digitally aberration-corrected.