Illumination-related errors in limited-angle optical diffraction tomography

In the paper, the design and tolerances of optical systems and scanning components used in limited-angle optical diffraction tomography are analyzed in order to improve the performance of the measurement systems and to encourage the application of tomography as a standard method for quantitative analysis of 3D refractive index distribution in biological microstructures. The first part of the presented analysis consists of component selection for the scanning device and optical system in the illumination part of the setup and the influence of the illumination wavefront on reconstruction quality. In the second part, the sensitivity of the tomographic reconstruction quality to three representative measurement-related errors based on synthetic data is demonstrated. Finally, a configuration of the system, selected to minimize reconstruction errors, is proposed and alignment tolerances simulated using the Monte Carlo method are provided. (C) 2017 Optical Society of America