Digital in-line holography for biological applications

Digital in-line holography with numerical reconstruction has been developed into anew tool, specifically for biological applications, that routinely a chieves both lateral and depth resolution, at least at the micron level, in three-dimensional imaging. The experimental and numerical procedures have been incorporated into a program package with a very fast reconstruction al gorithm that is now capable of real-time reconstruction. This capability is demonstrated for diverse objects, such as suspension of microspheres and b iological samples (diatom, the head of Drosophila melanogaster), and the ad vantages are discussed by comparing holographic reconstructions with images taken by using conventional compound light microscopy.