Re‐Scan Confocal Microscopy

Abstract

As we all know, the most important property of the confocal microscope is optical sectioning (axial resolution). A bit forgotten fact is that confocal microscopy has the potential of lateral super‐resolution (better resolution than Abbe's law dictates). This lateral super‐resolution can only be obtained by sacrificing precious fluorescence signal and thus by getting noisy images. This problem has now been solved by a simple re‐design of the optics: re‐scan confocal microscopy (RCM).