MORPHOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF ANIMAL SPERM BY MEANS OF A DIGITAL HOLOGRAPHY MICROSCOPE

Digital holography has been employed in the retrieval of three dimensional images of animal sperm heads. Microscopic holography measurements are performed by projecting a magnified image of a microscopic hologram plane onto a CCD plane. This could constitute the basis of an alternative method aimed at the investigation of morphological features of the sperm cells. Indeed, one of the main advantages of digital holography consists in its full non-invasivity and in the capability of investigating the shape of the sperm cells without altering their characteristics. In particular such a technique could be applied to investigate the frequency of aberrant spermatozoa. Until now, in fact, such an investigation has been mainly performed by means of specific painting probes: unfortunately this technique dramatically reduces the vitality of the sperm cells and can even cause chromosome aberration, making them useless for the zootechnical applications. Our preliminary results demonstrate the unique capability of the proposed technique to accurately characterize the morphology of the cells giving high resolution images without perturbing the system in any way.