Spatially variant PSF modeling in confocal macroscopy

TL;DR

This paper addresses the challenge of modeling spatially varying point spread functions in confocal macroscopy, proposing an experiment and optimization method to improve PSF accuracy across large fields of view.

Contribution

It introduces a novel experiment and optimization approach to assess and model the field-dependent PSF in confocal macroscopy, reducing model complexity.

Findings

PSF varies symmetrically with distance from the center

Proposed method effectively assesses the field center

Results facilitate improved image reconstruction in macroscopy

Abstract

Point spread function (PSF) plays an essential role in image reconstruction. In the context of confocal microscopy, optical performance degrades towards the edge of the field of view as astigmatism, coma and vignetting. Thus, one should expect the related artifacts to be even stronger in macroscopy, where the field of view is much larger. The field aberrations in macroscopy fluorescence imaging system was observed to be symmetrical and to increase with the distance from the center of the field of view. In this paper we propose an experiment and an optimization method for assessing the center of the field of view. The obtained results constitute a step towards reducing the number of parameters in macroscopy PSF model.