Enhanced resolution through thick tissue with structured illumination and adaptive optics

Abstract

© 2015 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). Structured illumination microscopy provides twice the linear resolution of conventional fluorescence microscopy, but in thick samples, aberrations degrade the performance and limit the resolution. Here, we demonstrate structured illumination microscopy through 35 μm of tissue using adaptive optics (AO) to correct aberrations resulting in images with a resolution of 140 nm. We report a 60% minimum improvement in the signal-tonoise ratio of the structured illumination reconstruction through thick tissue by correction with AO.