Development of Novel Bio-medical Imaging System for Monitoring/Screening of Cancers based on Quantitative Margin Detection between Healthy and Malignant Biological Cells/Tissues

The project will be focus on cellular imaging by DHM to identify various diseases and to monitor the living cells with addition of anti-disease drugs to cell cultural medium by characterization and studying the parameters of interest of the infected and non-infected cells like change in their physical thickness, index of refraction, quantifying the morphological changes etc. For example, cellular volume changes play an important role in many processes associated with the normal cell activity as well as various diseases. Imaging of mostly transparent microscopic biological specimens presents a special challenge. Existing techniques such as Zernike phase-contrast microscopy and differential interference contrast microscopy do not offer direct quantitative evaluation of the phase information. In digital holography, however, the phase information is directly available from the calculated optical field. DH-QPM has been used to monitor the morphological changes during trypsinization, hypo-osmotic, and apoptosis processes and research is still being carried out in order to expand this field. However, a very few investigations have been carried out to study the drug-induced dynamic changes of a single cell's cytoskeleton.