Use of digital micro mirror devices in quantitative microscopy

There are numerous modes of microscopy such as brightfield, darkfield, phase contrast, fluorescence, reflected light, confocal, etc. All of these forms of microscopy deliver illumination light in a controlled fashion to the object to be examined and collect as much light containing the desired information as possible. The majority of these methods use appropriately placed and formed diaphragms (iris, pin hole, annulus, etc.) and lenses to control both the incident angles of the illumination light and its intensity as well as the size and location of the illuminated area in the sample. Usually these diaphragms are a simple iris or annulus and are almost always static. The novel aspect of the system being presented is to replace these simple mechanical diaphragms with digital micro mirror devices ('DMDs made by Texas Instruments) to allow for more precise, flexible control over the transmission behavior of these optical planes. By placing DMDs in the same plane tactual or conjugate) as that of the field iris, illumination aperture iris (condenser diaphragm), objective lens aperture stop, and field stop, one has the ability to rapidly switch between brightfield, darkfield, confocal and reconstruction microscopy. In addition because of the intensity modulating features of DMDs, one can create a uniform illumination distributions in the sample or a non-uniform distribution.