2025/12/03 by Cael Warner, Warner, Cael
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #65M06 #Computational Physics (physics.comp-ph) #Digital Holography and Microscopy #Electromagnetic Fields and Biological Effects #FOS: Physical sciences #Microwave Imaging and Scattering Analysis
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2512.03858
openalex publication_date 2025/12/03 · openalex created_date 2025/12/05 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The Born-Rytov approximation estimates effective refractive index of biological cells from measurements of scattered light intensity, polarization and phase. Effective refractive index is useful for estimating a biological cell's dry mass, volume, and internal morphology directly from its elastic light scattering pattern. This work compares the Born-Rytov approximation with analytical, Yee-lattice finite-difference time-domain, and discrete-dipole approximations to Maxwell's equations in the cases of electromagnetic scattering from a sphere and a tomographic reconstruction of Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Practical advantages and limitations of each numerical method are compared for modeling electromagnetic scattering of both near-field intensity and the far-field projected intensity, in terms of accuracy, memory, and compute time. When compared with a commercial software implementation of the Yee-lattice finite-difference time domain method, the Born-Rytov scattering approximation and discrete dipole approximation show better agreement with the far-field light scattering pattern from Saccharomyces cerevisiae.