Axial resolution enhancement for planar Airy beam light-sheet microscopy via the complementary beam subtraction method

Differential synthetic illumination based on multi-line detection for resolution and contrast enhancement of line confocal microscopy

Line confocal (LC) microscopy is a fast 3D imaging technique, but its asymmetric detection slit limits resolution and optical sectioning. To address this, we propose the differential synthetic illumination (DSI) method based on multi-line detection to enhance the spatial resolution and optical sectioning capability of the LC system. The DSI method allows the imaging process to simultaneously accomplish on a single camera, which ensures the rapidity and stability of the imaging process. DSI-LC improves X- and Z-axis resolution by 1.28 and 1.26 times, respectively, and optical sectioning by 2.6 times compared to LC. Furthermore, the spatially resolved power and contrast are also demonstrated by imaging pollen, microtubule, and the fiber of the GFP fluorescence-labeled mouse brain. Finally, Video-rate imaging of zebrafish larval heart beating in a 665.6 × 332.8 µm² field-of-view is achieved. DSI-LC provides a promising approach for 3D large-scale and functional imaging in vivo with improved resolution, contrast, and robustness.

Enhanced axial resolution of lattice light sheet microscopy by fluorescence differential detection

Lattice light-sheet microscopy (LLSM) is promising in long-term biological volumetric imaging due to its high spatiotemporal resolution and low phototoxicity. However, three-dimensional (3D) isotropic spatial resolution remains an unmet goal in LLSM because of its poorer axial resolution. Combing LLSM with fluorescence differential detection, namely LLSDM, has been proposed to improve the axial resolution of LLSM in simulation. It demonstrates the possibility of further enhancing the axial resolution in 3D volumetric imaging with LLSM by specifically discarding the off-focus photons captured using a complementary optical lattice (OL) profile generated with additional 0-π phase modulation at the objective pupil plane. The direct generation of the complementary lattice profile using the binary phase modulator conjugated to the sample plane for amplitude modulation, as used in LLSM, is also permittable. Nevertheless, the previously proposed configuration fails to provide a symmetric complementary lattice pattern along the axial axis, thus leading to the imbalanced off-focus photon suppression in the reconstructed images after subtraction [Opt. Lett.45, 2854 (2020)10.1364/OL.393378]. Here, we modified the LLSDM theory which can produce an ideal complementary lattice pattern with central zero intensity and symmetrically distributed sidelobes. We also analyzed the impact of numerical aperture matching between the original and complementary lattice patterns and presented the consistency between the simulated and experimental results. As demonstrated by imaging the distribution of fluorescent beads and microtubules in fixed U2OS cells, as well as the dynamics of filopodia in live U2OS cells, LLSDM provides about 1.5 times improvement in axial resolution, and higher imaging contrast compared with traditional LLSM.