  Optical imaging plays a critical role in advancing our understanding of three
dimensional dynamics of biological systems. Coherent imaging (CI) methods
exploit spatial phase information, encoded through propagation of coherent
signal light emerging from a specimen, to extract a three-dimensional
representation of the object from a single high-speed measurement. Until now,
CI methods could not be applied to incoherent light, severely limiting their
ability to image the most powerful biological probes available - fluorescent
molecules - with sufficient speed and volume to observe important processes,
such as neural processing in live specimens. We introduce a new imaging
technique that transfers the spatial propagation phase of coherent illumination
light to incoherent fluorescent light emission. The transfer of propagation
phase allows CI techniques to be applied to fluorescent light imaging, and
leads to large increases in imaging speed and depth of field. With this
advance, biological imaging of fluorescent molecules is significantly expanded.
