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Feature Issue of JOSA A

Quantitative Phase Imaging (QPI)

Submissions Open: 1 April 2024

Submission Deadline: 31 May 2024

Quantitative Phase Imaging (QPI), a field catalyzed by the advent of digital holography, has revolutionized our ability to precisely measure phase delay. The development of QPI techniques, whether through laser interferometry or computational approaches using partially coherent light, has significantly improved the sensitivity and accuracy of phase measurements. Over the past two decades, we have witnessed a boom in the field of QPI, which has fostered many applications in biomedicine and material metrology fields, such as weighing single cell dry mass, quantifying cell dynamics and viability, profiling material structures, defect inspection, etc.

Gabriel "Gabi" Popescu, a former distinguished professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, was a pioneer in the field of QPI and label-free biological imaging. Tragically, Prof. Popescu suffered a fatal accident near his home in Romania on June 16, 2022.

Prof. Popescu invented several common-path QPI methods, most notably diffraction phase microscopy and spatial light interference microscopy, which have been widely used for research studies. Extending QPI to 3D imaging, he developed several inverse scattering models that led to the invention of white-light diffraction tomography, harmonic optical tomography, and most recently artificial confocal microscopy. Besides originating new QPI methods, Prof. Popescu identified many important applications of QPI, such as analyzing cell growth/cycle and viability, red blood cell physiology, histopathology, neuroscience, material metrology, and more.

This special issue is intended to disseminate methodologies and theories of QPI and their broad applications such as biology, medicine and material science, as well as honor Prof. Popescu’s contribution to QPI and label-free imaging. We invite all colleagues in the QPI community to submit to this special feature in JOSA A.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

  • Phase retrieval and phase unwrapping algorithms
  • Phase image post-processing and segmentation algorithms
  • Machine-learning approaches
  • Strategies to improve sensitivity or resolution
  • 2D/3D inverse scattering theory
  • Coherent effects
  • Novel methodologies and instrumentations
  • New common-path methods
  • Intensity-based methods
  • 3D QPI methods
  • Applications of QPI in imaging cells, tissue and materials

All submissions need to present original, previously unpublished work and will be subject to the normal standards and peer review processes of the journal. The standard JOSA A Article Publication Charges will apply to all published articles.

Please prepare manuscripts according to the author instructions for submission to JOSA A and submit through the Prism submission system, specifying from the drop-down menu that the manuscript is for the feature issue on "Quantitative Phase Imaging (QPI)."

Feature Editors

Renjie Zhou, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China (Lead Editor)
Peter T. C. So, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA
Paul Park, Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology (KAIST), South Korea
Yang Liu, University of Pittsburgh, USA
Seung Ah Lee, Yonsei University, South Korea
Chenfei Hu, Applied Materials, USA