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Lei Tian

Lei Tian contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

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physics.optics eess.IV Biological Physics Computer Vision eess.SP physics.med-ph

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preprint2026arXiv

DeepFilters: Scattering-Aware Pupil Engineering with Learned Digital Filter Reconstruction for Extended Depth of Field Microscopy

Extended depth of field microscopy encodes axial information into a single acquisition through engineered point spread functions, but conventional and deep optics approaches are subject to degradation in scattering tissue. We introduce DeepFilters, a scattering-aware deep optics framework that jointly optimizes a parameterized pupil filter and a digital-filter-based reconstruction network through a calibrated differentiable forward model to achieve broad generalization without retraining. Incorporating empirical scattering kernels, physics-guided regularization, and a hybrid genetic-gradient initialization strategy, DeepFilters extends the PSF from 16 micron to >400 micron in clear media and enables signal recovery beyond 120 micron deep in biological tissues, validated across fixed brain slices and sea urchin embryos.

preprint2025arXiv

Mid-Infrared Photothermal Relaxation Intensity Diffraction Tomography for Video-rate Volumetric Chemical Imaging

Three-dimensional molecular imaging of living cells is essential for unraveling cellular metabolism and response to therapies. However, existing volumetric methods, including fluorescence microscopy and quantitative phase imaging, either require fluorescent labels or lack chemical specificity. Mid-infrared (mid-IR) photothermal microscopy provides label-free spectroscopic contrast with sub-micrometer resolution but is limited by slow acquisition rates, precluding 3D live-cell studies. Here, we present a photothermal relaxation intensity diffraction tomography (PRIDT) system that encodes mid-IR absorption induced refractive index change via a photothermal relaxation scheme and recovers it through intensity diffraction tomography. PRIDT achieves video-rate volumetric chemical imaging with up to 15 Hz per wavelength and offers lateral and axial resolutions of 264 nm and 1.12 um over a volumetric field of view of 50x50x10 um3. We showcase high-speed PRIDT imaging of protein and lipid metabolism in ovarian cancer cells and lipid-droplet dynamics in live cells. PRIDT opens new avenues for rapid, quantitative, three-dimensional molecular imaging in living systems.

preprint2022arXiv

Adaptive 3D descattering with a dynamic synthesis network

Deep learning has been broadly applied to imaging in scattering applications. A common framework is to train a descattering network for image recovery by removing scattering artifacts. To achieve the best results on a broad spectrum of scattering conditions, individual "expert" networks need to be trained for each condition. However, the expert's performance sharply degrades when the testing condition differs from the training. An alternative brute-force approach is to train a "generalist" network using data from diverse scattering conditions. It generally requires a larger network to encapsulate the diversity in the data and a sufficiently large training set to avoid overfitting. Here, we propose an adaptive learning framework, termed dynamic synthesis network (DSN), which dynamically adjusts the model weights and adapts to different scattering conditions. The adaptability is achieved by a novel "mixture of experts" architecture that enables dynamically synthesizing a network by blending multiple experts using a gating network. We demonstrate the DSN in holographic 3D particle imaging for a variety of scattering conditions. We show in simulation that our DSN provides generalization across a continuum of scattering conditions. In addition, we show that by training the DSN entirely on simulated data, the network can generalize to experiments and achieve robust 3D descattering. We expect the same concept can find many other applications, such as denoising and imaging in scattering media. Broadly, our dynamic synthesis framework opens up a new paradigm for designing highly adaptive deep learning and computational imaging techniques.

preprint2022arXiv

Bond-Selective Intensity Diffraction Tomography

Recovering molecular information remains a grand challenge in the widely used holographic and computational imaging technologies. To address this challenge, we developed a computational mid-infrared photothermal microscope, termed Bond-selective Intensity Diffraction Tomography (BS-IDT). Based on a low-cost brightfield microscope with an add-on pulsed light source, BS-IDT recovers both infrared spectra and bond-selective 3D refractive index maps from intensity-only measurements. High-fidelity infrared fingerprint spectra extraction is validated. Volumetric chemical imaging of biological cells is demonstrated at a speed of ~20 seconds per volume, with a lateral and axial resolution of ~350 nm and ~1.1 micron, respectively. BS-IDT's application potential is investigated by chemically quantifying lipids stored in cancer cells and volumetric chemical imaging on Caenorhabditis elegans with a large field of view (~100 micron X 100 micron).

preprint2022arXiv

Deep-learning-augmented Computational Miniature Mesoscope

Fluorescence microscopy is essential to study biological structures and dynamics. However, existing systems suffer from a tradeoff between field-of-view (FOV), resolution, and complexity, and thus cannot fulfill the emerging need of miniaturized platforms providing micron-scale resolution across centimeter-scale FOVs. To overcome this challenge, we developed Computational Miniature Mesoscope (CM$^2$) that exploits a computational imaging strategy to enable single-shot 3D high-resolution imaging across a wide FOV in a miniaturized platform. Here, we present CM$^2$ V2 that significantly advances both the hardware and computation. We complement the 3$\times$3 microlens array with a new hybrid emission filter that improves the imaging contrast by 5$\times$, and design a 3D-printed freeform collimator for the LED illuminator that improves the excitation efficiency by 3$\times$. To enable high-resolution reconstruction across the large imaging volume, we develop an accurate and efficient 3D linear shift-variant (LSV) model that characterizes the spatially varying aberrations. We then train a multi-module deep learning model, CM$^2$Net, using only the 3D-LSV simulator. We show that CM$^2$Net generalizes well to experiments and achieves accurate 3D reconstruction across a $\sim$7-mm FOV and 800-$μ$m depth, and provides $\sim$6-$μ$m lateral and $\sim$25-$μ$m axial resolution. This provides $\sim$8$\times$ better axial localization and $\sim$1400$\times$ faster speed as compared to the previous model-based algorithm. We anticipate this simple and low-cost computational miniature imaging system will be impactful to many large-scale 3D fluorescence imaging applications.

preprint2022arXiv

Frequency-Angle Two-Dimensional Reflection Coefficient Modeling Based on Terahertz Channel Measurement

Terahertz (THz) channel propagation characteristics are vital for the design, evaluation, and optimization for THz communication systems. Moreover, reflection plays a significant role in channel propagation. In this letter, the reflection coefficient of the THz channel is researched based on extensive measurement campaigns. Firstly, we set up the THz channel sounder from 220 to 320 GHz with the incident angle ranging from 10° to 80°. Based on the measured propagation loss, the reflection coefficients of five building materials, i.e., glass, tile, aluminium alloy, board, and plasterboard, are calculated separately for frequencies and incident angles. It is found that the lack of THz relative parameters leads to the Fresnel model of non-metallic materials can not fit the measured data well. Thus, we propose a frequency-angle two-dimensional reflection coefficient model by modifying the Fresnel model with the Lorenz and Drude model. The proposed model characterizes the frequency and incident angle for reflection coefficients and shows low root-mean-square error with the measured data. Generally, these results are useful for modeling THz channels.

preprint2022arXiv

High-fidelity intensity diffraction tomography with a non-paraxial multiple-scattering model

We propose a novel intensity diffraction tomography (IDT) reconstruction algorithm based on the split-step non-paraxial (SSNP) model for recovering the 3D refractive index (RI) distribution of multiple-scattering biological samples. High-quality IDT reconstruction requires high-angle illumination to encode both low- and high- spatial frequency information of the 3D biological sample. We show that our SSNP model can more accurately compute multiple scattering from high-angle illumination compared to paraxial approximation-based multiple-scattering models. We apply this SSNP model to both sequential and multiplexed IDT techniques. We develop a unified reconstruction algorithm for both IDT modalities that is highly computationally efficient and is implemented by a modular automatic differentiation framework. We demonstrate the capability of our reconstruction algorithm on both weakly scattering buccal epithelial cells and strongly scattering live $\textit{C. elegans}$ worms and live $\textit{C. elegans}$ embryos.

preprint2022arXiv

Recovery of Continuous 3D Refractive Index Maps from Discrete Intensity-Only Measurements using Neural Fields

Intensity diffraction tomography (IDT) refers to a class of optical microscopy techniques for imaging the 3D refractive index (RI) distribution of a sample from a set of 2D intensity-only measurements. The reconstruction of artifact-free RI maps is a fundamental challenge in IDT due to the loss of phase information and the missing cone problem. Neural fields (NF) has recently emerged as a new deep learning (DL) approach for learning continuous representations of physical fields. NF uses a coordinate-based neural network to represent the field by mapping the spatial coordinates to the corresponding physical quantities, in our case the complex-valued refractive index values. We present DeCAF as the first NF-based IDT method that can learn a high-quality continuous representation of a RI volume from its intensity-only and limited-angle measurements. The representation in DeCAF is learned directly from the measurements of the test sample by using the IDT forward model, without any ground-truth RI maps. We qualitatively and quantitatively evaluate DeCAF on the simulated and experimental biological samples. Our results show that DeCAF can generate high-contrast and artifact-free RI maps and lead to up to 2.1 times reduction in MSE over existing methods.

preprint2021arXiv

Acousto-optic Ptychography

Acousto-optic imaging (AOI) enables optical-contrast imaging deep inside scattering samples via localized ultrasound-modulation of scattered light. While AOI allows optical investigations at depths, its imaging resolution is inherently limited by the ultrasound wavelength, prohibiting microscopic investigations. Here, we propose a novel computational imaging approach that allows to achieve optical diffraction-limited imaging using a conventional AOI system. We achieve this by extracting diffraction-limited imaging information from 'memory-effect' speckle-correlations in the conventionally detected ultrasound-modulated scattered-light fields. Specifically, we identify that since speckle correlations allow to estimate the Fourier-magnitude of the field inside the ultrasound focus, scanning the ultrasound focus enables robust diffraction-limited reconstruction of extended objects using ptychography, i.e. we exploit the ultrasound focus as the scanned spatial-gate 'probe' required for ptychographic phase-retrieval. Moreover, we exploit the short speckle decorrelation-time in dynamic media, which is usually considered a hurdle for wavefront-shaping based approaches, for improved ptychographic reconstruction. We experimentally demonstrate non-invasive imaging of targets that extend well beyond the memory-effect range, with a 40-times resolution improvement over conventional AOI, surpassing the performance of state-of-the-art approaches.

preprint2021arXiv

Roadmap on Wavefront Shaping and deep imaging in complex media

The last decade has seen the development of a wide set of tools, such as wavefront shaping, computational or fundamental methods, that allow to understand and control light propagation in a complex medium, such as biological tissues or multimode fibers. A vibrant and diverse community is now working on this field, that has revolutionized the prospect of diffraction-limited imaging at depth in tissues. This roadmap highlights several key aspects of this fast developing field, and some of the challenges and opportunities ahead.

preprint2020arXiv

Diffuser-based computational imaging funduscope

Poor access to eye care is a major global challenge that could be ameliorated by low-cost, portable, and easy-to-use diagnostic technologies. Diffuser-based imaging has the potential to enable inexpensive, compact optical systems that can reconstruct a focused image of an object over a range of defocus errors. Here, we present a diffuser-based computational funduscope that reconstructs important clinical features of a model eye. Compared to existing diffuser-imager architectures, our system features an infinite-conjugate design by relaying the ocular lens onto the diffuser. This offers shift-invariance across a wide field-of-view (FOV) and an invariant magnification across an extended depth range. Experimentally, we demonstrate fundus image reconstruction over a 33$^{\circ}$ FOV and robustness to $\pm$4D refractive error using a constant point-spread-function. Combined with diffuser-based wavefront sensing, this technology could enable combined ocular aberrometry and funduscopic screening through a single diffuser sensor.

preprint2020arXiv

Displacement-agnostic coherent imaging through scatter with an interpretable deep neural network

Coherent imaging through scatter is a challenging task in computational imaging. Both model-based and data-driven approaches have been explored to solve the inverse scattering problem. In our previous work, we have shown that a deep learning approach can make high-quality and highly generalizable predictions through unseen diffusers. Here, we propose a new deep neural network (DNN) model that is agnostic to a broader class of perturbations including scatterer change, displacements, and system defocus up to 10X depth of field. In addition, we develop a new analysis framework for interpreting the mechanism of our DNN model and visualizing its generalizability based on an unsupervised dimension reduction technique. We show that our DNN can unmix the scattering-specific information and extract the object-specific information so as to achieve generalization under different scattering conditions. Our work paves the way to a highly robust and interpretable deep learning approach to imaging through scattering media.

preprint2020arXiv

SIMBA: Scalable Inversion in Optical Tomography using Deep Denoising Priors

Two features desired in a three-dimensional (3D) optical tomographic image reconstruction algorithm are the ability to reduce imaging artifacts and to do fast processing of large data volumes. Traditional iterative inversion algorithms are impractical in this context due to their heavy computational and memory requirements. We propose and experimentally validate a novel scalable iterative mini-batch algorithm (SIMBA) for fast and high-quality optical tomographic imaging. SIMBA enables high-quality imaging by combining two complementary information sources: the physics of the imaging system characterized by its forward model and the imaging prior characterized by a denoising deep neural net. SIMBA easily scales to very large 3D tomographic datasets by processing only a small subset of measurements at each iteration. We establish the theoretical fixed-point convergence of SIMBA under nonexpansive denoisers for convex data-fidelity terms. We validate SIMBA on both simulated and experimentally collected intensity diffraction tomography (IDT) datasets. Our results show that SIMBA can significantly reduce the computational burden of 3D image formation without sacrificing the imaging quality.

preprint2019arXiv

High-speed in vitro intensity diffraction tomography

We demonstrate a label-free, scan-free {\it intensity} diffraction tomography technique utilizing annular illumination (aIDT) to rapidly characterize large-volume 3D refractive index distributions in vitro. By optimally matching the illumination geometry to the microscope pupil, our technique reduces the data requirement by 60$\times$ to achieve high-speed 10 Hz volume rates. Using 8 intensity images, we recover $\sim350\times100\times20μ$m$^3$ volumes with near diffraction-limited lateral resolution of 487 nm and axial resolution of 3.4 $μ$m. Our technique's large volume rate and high resolution enables 3D quantitative phase imaging of complex living biological samples across multiple length scales. We demonstrate aIDT's capabilities on unicellular diatom microalgae, epithelial buccal cell clusters with native bacteria, and live \emph{Caenorhabditis elegans} specimens. Within these samples, we recover macro-scale cellular structures, subcellular organelles, and dynamic micro-organism tissues with minimal motion artifacts. Quantifying such features has significant utility in oncology, immunology, and cellular pathophysiology, where these morphological features are evaluated for changes in the presence of disease, parasites, and new drug treatments. Finally, we simulate our aIDT system to highlight the accuracy and sensitivity of our technique. aIDT shows promise as a powerful high-speed, label-free computational microscopy technique applications where natural imaging is required to evaluate environmental effects on a sample in real-time. We provide example datasets and an open source implementation of aIDT at \href{https://github.com/bu-cisl/IDT-using-Annular-Illumination}{https://github.com/bu-cisl/IDT-using-Annular-Illumination}.

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