GPU-Based Rapid Processing of 3-D Refractive Index Maps of Biological Cells from Tomographic Phase Microscopy

We present a highly parallel and efficient algorithm for real-time reconstruction of the quantitative three-dimensional (3-D) refractive-index maps of biological cells without labeling, as obtained from the interferometric projections acquired by tomographic phase microscopy (TPM). The new algorithm is implemented on the graphic processing unit (GPU) of the computer using CUDA programming environment. The reconstruction process includes two main parts. First, we used parallel complex wave-front reconstruction of the TPM-based interferometric projections acquired at various angles. The complex wave front reconstructions are done on the GPU in parallel, while minimizing the calculation time of the Fourier transforms and phase unwrapping needed. Next, we implemented on the GPU in parallel the 3-D refractive index map retrieval using the TPM filtered-back projection algorithm. The incorporation of algorithms that are inherently parallel with a programming environment such as Nvidia’s CUDA made it possible to obtain real-time processing rate, and enabled high-throughput platform for label-free, 3-D cell visualization and diagnosis.