Diffusion-based single-shot diffraction tomography

Holographic microscopy is a powerful technique for noninvasive label-free biomedical imaging. Most holographic methods utilize reference light and/or multiple measurements to observe both the amplitude and phase of a light wave passing through a specimen. However, such fundamental requirements degrade the spatial resolution due to the use of a reference carrier, cause difficulties for real-time imaging of dynamic biological events, and make the optical setups bulky. Here, we realized reference-free, single-shot holographic tomography by just inserting a diffuser into the optical path in a conventional microscope setup to generate randomly structured illumination. A three-dimensional complex amplitude field was reconstructed from a single scattered intensity image by means of sparsity-constrained multislice phase retrieval.