Serial coherent diffraction imaging of dynamic samples based on inter-frame continuity

Coherent diffraction imaging (CDI) provides lens-free imaging with diffraction-limited resolution and has become an important imaging modality at synchrotron facilities worldwide. The performance of current CDI approaches remains limited, particularly in their ability to handle dynamic samples or achieve consistent high-quality reconstructions. Here, we propose a novel coherent imaging approach for dynamic samples, which exploits the inter-frame continuity of the sample’s local structures as an additional constraint in phasing a sequence of diffraction patterns. Our algorithm incorporates an adaptive similarity determination procedure, eliminating the requirement for invariant regions in the sample and ensuring broad applicability to diverse sample types. We demonstrated the feasibility of this technique through experiments on various dynamic samples, achieving high-fidelity reconstructions within a few hundred iterations. With the same simple setup as conventional CDI, high image quality, and the ability to separate the sample transmission from its illumination probe, our method has the potential to significantly advance X-ray imaging and electron microscopy techniques for dynamic sample analysis.