Holography: The Usefulness of Digital Holographic Microscopy for Clinical Diagnostics

22 March 2017
Authors
Zahra El-Schich, Sofia Kamlund, Birgit Janicke, Kersti Alm and Anette Gjörloff Wingren

Abstract

Digital holographic (DH) microscopy is a digital high-resolution holographic imaging technique with the capacity of quantification of cellular conditions without any staining or labeling of cells. 

The unique measurable parameters are the cell number, cell area, thickness, and volume, which can be coupled to proliferation, migration, cell cycle analysis, viability, and cell death.

The technique is cell friendly, fast and simple to use and has unique imaging capabilities for time-lapse investigations on both the single cell and the cell-population levels. 

The interest for analyzing specifically cell volume changes with DH microscopy, resulting from cytotoxic treatments, drug response, or apoptosis events has recently increased in popularity.

We and others have used DH microscopy showing that the technique has the sensitivity to distinguish between different cells and treatments. 

Recently, DH microscopy has been used for cellular diagnosis in the clinic, providing support for using the concept of DH, e.g., screening of malaria infection of red blood cells (RBC), cervix cancer screening, and sperm quality.

Because of its quick and label-free sample handling, DH microscopy will be an important tool in the future for personalized medicine investigations, determining the optimal therapeutic concentration for both different cancer types and individual treatments.

Conclusion

The correlation between cellular morphological changes and cellular events is rather well documented. 

In several studies, researchers have shown how holographic cell morphology analysis can be connected to pathological diagnostics. 

Although the experiments in some cases have been performed ex vivo or in animal models, the analysis of humans is just one small step ahead. 

For other of the abovementioned applications, experiments are performed with human tissues, and the methods are already beginning to be developed for clinical use. 

As DH microscopy is noninvasive, the same patient sample can often be used for other analyses, thus adding further benefit to the method.

Further research

Future applications could include real-time monitoring of holographic microscopy parameters in human clinical cell samples in response to a broad range of clinically relevant compounds.

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