AI-driven digital holographic microscopy for label-free quantitative cellular analysis: toward low-cost and field-deployable platforms

Abstract

Recent progress in artificial intelligence (AI) and digital holographic microscopy (DHM) has enabled quantitative, label-free, and noninvasive cellular imaging with unprecedented precision. This review provides an overview of AI-driven DHM technologies that transform classical holographic phase reconstruction and cellular analysis into real-time, portable biomedical solutions. After outlining the optical and computational fundamentals of DHM and quantitative phase imaging, we describe how deep generative and diffusion models substantially enhance phase retrieval accuracy under noisy or single-shot conditions. We then summarize recent biomedical applications, integrating blood, cancer, and cardiac cell analyses into a unified framework of AI-assisted quantitative phenotyping. Deep and self-supervised learning approaches are shown to enable high-accuracy classification of red blood cells and cancer cells and label-free evaluation of cardiomyocyte contractility and drug response. The combination of AI-based reconstruction, self-supervised learning, and physics-informed modeling demonstrates robust performance even with limited labeled data. Finally, we discuss the system-level transition toward low-cost, edge-AI-enabled DHM platforms capable of real-time phase imaging in point-of-care or field environments. We highlight key challenges in data standardization, interpretability, and multimodal integration. Collectively, this review envisions AI-integrated DHM as a scalable, accessible technology bridging advanced quantitative imaging with practical biomedical diagnostics. (c) 2026 Optica Publishing Group under the terms of the Optica Open Access Publishing Agreement