A lensless microscope images an entire half-millimeter-thick mouse brain slice

The system produced label-free three-dimensional images across a large area while accounting for light scattered through the tissue.

Editorial illustration — not from the study.

The method uses holograms recorded with several wavelengths and angled illumination, along with automatic calibration of the illumination angles. Its reconstruction process models multiple scattering—the redirection of light within a sample—rather than relying only on simpler first-order approximations.

In tests, the researchers reconstructed a custom multilayer polymer structure over 1.7 millimeters of depth and a 25-square-millimeter field of view. They also demonstrated on-chip, label-free imaging of an entire 500-micrometer-thick slice of optically cleared mouse brain.

What the microscope imaged

The lensless holotomography system achieved a field of view larger than 0.6 square centimeters, a millimeter-scale axial range and pixel-level resolution of about 2.4 micrometers. The researchers say its multiple-scattering-aware reconstruction outperformed first-order Born- and Rytov-based inversions in their tests. A custom multilayer two-photon-polymerized structure was reconstructed across 1.7 millimeters of depth and 25 square millimeters of area, producing a three-dimensional space-bandwidth product above the gigavoxel scale. The team also imaged an entire 500-micrometer-thick, optically cleared mouse-brain tissue slice without labels.

Why larger 3D views matter

Conventional lens-based three-dimensional quantitative imaging is limited in how much area and depth it can cover at once. By combining a large field of view with depth and resolution while addressing light scattering, this approach could support larger-volume, label-free imaging in neuroscience, biomedicine and materials research. The abstract presents these as potential applications rather than results already demonstrated across those fields.

Evidence and caveats

The evidence comes from an imaging-method study: a custom test structure was reconstructed under specified depth and field-of-view conditions, and the system was demonstrated on one type of biological sample described in the abstract. The abstract does not report the number of tissue slices, comparisons with a specific established microscope on biological samples, or quantitative accuracy measures for the mouse-brain images. The biological demonstration used an optically cleared tissue slice, so the results do not by themselves establish performance in intact, uncleared brain tissue or other samples.

Ninety-two antiprotons make a 7.5-kilometre road trip

Researchers transported 92 trapped antiprotons 7.5 kilometres by road without losing particles or measurably worsening the trap’s vacuum. The demonstration could allow future matter–antimatter tests in laboratories with less magnetic-field noise than CERN’s Antimatter Factory.

9 hours ago·2 views

Physics & Space

AI classifiers can help recreate private training images

Researchers developed an attack that uses an AI classifier to reconstruct representative images from its private training data. In tests, the approach produced more faithful images than earlier methods while maintaining similar accuracy in identifying their target classes.

1 day ago·9 views

Physics & Space

A bright beam of muonium could put gravity to a new test

Researchers report a bright, narrow beam of muonium made by extracting it from a thin layer of superfluid helium. The beam is expected to enable a new test of gravity and more precise measurements of the muon.

3 days ago·41 views