Low cost digital holographic microscope for 3-D cell imaging by integrating smartphone and DVD optical head

Portable devices and potential mobile health care is gaining importance and has become the new trend for point of care diagnosis. In this paper we present a compact, inexpensive and smartphone based digital holographic microscope (SmartDHM) for 3-D cell imaging which is developed by modifying a commercial digital video disk (DVD) optical head to act as an interferometer. Smartphone is integrated into this setup to capture interferogram and an android application is developed which performs computation on smartphone using reference conjugated hologram method to extract phase information without the need for connectivity to any server or a computer. Since smartphone has sufficient frame rate to capture interferograms, SmartDHM can be used for real time acquisition. The use of smartphone with custom built android application and DVD optical head has resulted in miniaturization and low cost. This system is successfully demonstrated by imaging phase profiles of typical RBC and HeLa cells. Utilization of smartphone for computation and 3D rendering may prove to be useful for making low cost devices with ease of diagnosis at remote locations in developing countries.