Single-shot 3D widefield fluorescence imaging with a computational miniature mesoscope
Xue, Yujia, Davison, Ian G., Boas, David A., Tian, Lei
Abstract
Fluorescence imaging is indispensable to biology and neuroscience. The need for largescale \nimaging in freely behaving animals has further driven the development in miniaturized \nmicroscopes (miniscopes). However, conventional microscopes / miniscopes are inherently \nconstrained by their limited space-bandwidth-product, shallow depth-of-field, and inability \nto resolve 3D distributed emitters. Here, we present a Computational Miniature Mesoscope \n(CM2) that overcomes these bottlenecks and enables single-shot 3D imaging across an 8 × \n7-mm2 field-of-view and 2.5-mm depth-of-field, achieving 7-μm lateral resolution and \nbetter than 200-μm axial resolution. Notably, the CM2 has a compact lightweight design \nthat integrates a microlens array for imaging and an LED array for excitation in a single \nplatform. Its expanded imaging capability is enabled by computational imaging that \naugments the optics by algorithms. We experimentally validate the mesoscopic 3D imaging \ncapability on volumetrically distributed fluorescent beads and fibers. We further quantify \nthe effects of bulk scattering and background fluorescence on phantom experiments.