De-scattering with Excitation Patterning (DEEP) Enables Rapid Wide-field Imaging Through Scattering Media

TL;DR

DEEP is a novel optical imaging technique that combines patterned excitation with computational imaging to enable rapid, wide-field imaging through scattering media, significantly reducing measurement time without sacrificing image quality.

Contribution

The paper introduces DEEP, a new method that leverages patterned excitation and computational imaging to improve deep tissue imaging speed and efficiency.

Findings

DEEP reduces measurement count from millions to hundreds.

DEEP achieves high-quality imaging at multiple scattering depths.

The approach is demonstrated using two-photon temporal focusing in tissue.

Abstract

From multi-photon imaging penetrating millimeters deep through scattering biological tissue, to super-resolution imaging conquering the diffraction limit, optical imaging techniques have greatly advanced in recent years. Notwithstanding, a key unmet challenge in all these imaging techniques is to perform rapid wide-field imaging through a turbid medium. Strategies such as active wave-front correction and multi-photon excitation, both used for deep tissue imaging; or wide-field total-internal-refection illumination, used for super-resolution imaging; can generate arbitrary excitation patterns over a large field-of-view through or under turbid media. In these cases, throughput advantage gained by wide-field excitation is lost due to the use of point detection. To address this challenge, here we introduce a novel technique called De-scattering with Excitation Patterning, or 'DEEP', which uses patterned excitation followed by wide-field detection with computational imaging. We use two-photon temporal focusing (TFM) to demonstrate our approach at multiple scattering lengths deep in tissue. Our results suggest that millions of point-scanning measurements could be substituted with tens to hundreds of DEEP measurements with no compromise in image quality.