Lensless Mueller holographic microscopy with robust noise reduction for multiplane polarization imaging

Lensless holographic microscopy has emerged as a powerful and cost-effective tool for computational imaging, offering high resolution over a large field of view, beneficial for various biological applications. However, conventional approaches can struggle with contrast and accurate visualization of diverse components over the samples, which can directly affect the diagnostic precision of the techniques. Mueller imaging, while offering detailed, stain-free observations of polarized light responses in samples, often has a limited field of view and single plane information. This is due to the use of high NA microscope objectives and generally complex hardware setups, thus narrowing its practical effectiveness. This work introduces a Lensless Mueller Holographic Microscopy (LMHM) system that overcomes these limitations, enabling large field of view, volumetric multi-layer imaging, and Mueller matrix computation using in-line lens-free holography setup. The proposed system provides precision visualization of polarization information in samples, offering high-quality features due to the incorporation of a numerical multi-height Gerchberg-Saxton reconstruction algorithm with additional complex field filtering and a physical rotating diffuser. The proposed LMHM framework is validated with a calibrated USAF 1951 birefringent test target. A multiplane sample containing cloth fiber is utilized to study the LMHM capabilities of imaging volumetric samples. Finally, the LMHM is used to analyze two mice’s brain slices, effectively showcasing this organ’s anatomy. Among other structures in the brain, the proposed method easily allows the visualization of, e.g., the corpus callosum. These results constitute a proof-of-concept evaluation for bioimaging applications.