Influence of multiple scattering on three-dimensional imagig with optical diffraction tomography

Optical diffraction tomography is an imaging technique that permits retrieval of the map of permittivity of an object from its scattered far field. Most reconstruction procedures assume that single scattering is dominant so that the scattered far field is linearly linked to the permittivity. In this work, we present a nonlinear inversion method and apply it to complex three-dimensional samples. We show that multiple scattering permits one to obtain a power of resolution beyond the classical limit imposed by the use of propagative incident and diffracted waves. Moreover, we stress that our imaging method is robust with respect to correlated and uncorrelated noise. (C) 2006 Optical Society of America.