Simple adaptive mobile phone screen illumination for dual phone differential phase contrast (DPDPC) microscopy

Phase contrast imaging is widely employed in the physical, biological, and medical sciences. However, typical implementations involve complex imaging systems that amount to in-line interferometers. We adapt differential phase contrast (DPC) to a dual-phone illumination-imaging system to obtain phase contrast images on a portable mobile phone platform. In this dual phone differential phase contrast (dpDPC) microscope, semicircles are projected sequentially on the display of one phone, and images are captured using a low-cost, short focal length lens attached to the second phone. By numerically combining images obtained using these semicircle patterns, high quality DPC images with ≈ 2 micrometer resolution can be easily acquired with no specialized hardware, circuitry, or instrument control programs.