Light-sheet microscopy with attenuation-compensated propagation-invariant beams

TL;DR

This paper introduces an attenuation-compensation method for light-sheet microscopy that enhances imaging depth and quality in biological tissues by strategically redistributing light intensity, improving signal-to-background and contrast-to-noise ratios without complex wavefront correction.

Contribution

The authors present a novel attenuation-compensation technique for propagation-invariant beams that boosts imaging performance across various light-sheet microscopy methods without requiring aberration correction.

Findings

Up to five-fold increase in signal-to-background ratio.

Up to eight-fold increase in contrast-to-noise ratio.

Applicable to Airy, Bessel, and lattice light-sheet microscopy.

Abstract

Scattering and absorption limit the penetration of optical fields into tissue, but wavefront correction, often used to compensate for these effects, is incompatible with wide field-of-view imaging and complex to implement. We demonstrate a new approach for increased penetration in light-sheet imaging, namely attenuation-compensation of the light field. This tailors an exponential intensity increase along the illuminating propagation-invariant field, enabling the redistribution of intensity strategically within a sample. This powerful yet straightforward concept, combined with the self-healing of the propagation-invariant field, improves the signal-to-background ratio of Airy light-sheet microscopy up to five-fold and the contrast-to-noise ratio up to eight-fold in thick biological specimens across the field-of-view without any aberration-correction. This improvement is not limited to Airy beam light-sheet microscopy, but can also significantly increase the imaging capabilities of Bessel and lattice light-sheet microscopy techniques, paving the way for widespread uptake by the biomedical community.