Dynamic monitoring of mitotic cell rounding based on Fourier ptychographic microscopy

Fourier ptychographic microscopy (FPM) integrates phase retrieval and synthetic aperture principles to achieve wide-field, high-resolution quantitative phase imaging (QPI) simultaneously. However, constrained by sample thickness, wavefront aberrations, and boundary artifacts, conventional FPM struggles to obtain high-quality quantitative phase images during live-cell mitotic rounding. To overcome these limitations, this study innovatively integrates depth-of-field extension technology, adaptive optical QPI (AO-QPI), and a boundary extension method. For artifacts induced by multi-layer defocus in thick samples, we establish a Thick-FPM (T-FPM) reconstruction model based on annular matched illumination and propose an energy-guided adaptive step size reconstruction algorithm. Compared to holography, this method achieves phase accuracy comparable to vertical optical path summation while reaching the incoherent diffraction-limited resolution. It effectively resolves bottlenecks in thick-sample imaging during dynamic observation of mitotic rounding in live cells, demonstrating broad application prospects in life sciences and AI-assisted diagnostics.