Advancing phase recovery in time-stretch computational cell imaging

The time-stretch imaging system is a promising method for achieving real-time imaging and low-latency cell screening. To facilitate the evaluation of time-stretch imaging systems for cell detection, we present a simulator for phase recovery in a time-stretch quantitative phase imaging (TS-QPI) system. The simulator enables the efficient evaluation of TS-QPI system, demonstrating the feasibility of accurate phase recovery for a wide range of cell screening conditions and designing the TS-QPI systems depending on the characteristics of the target cells. Furthermore, it allows synthesis of simulated phase images highly beneficial in data augmentation when training machine learning models for cell detection.