Remote scanning for ultra-large field of view in wide-field microscopy and full-field OCT

TL;DR

This paper introduces a remote scanning technique for wide-field microscopy and OCT that enables large-area, high-resolution imaging without moving the sample, suitable for biological specimens.

Contribution

The authors propose a novel remote scanning method that replaces sample movement with detection-side scanning, compatible with existing camera-based microscopes.

Findings

Achieves 2.2 mm field of view with 1.1 micron resolution

Compatible with wide-field microscopy and OCT

Effective for imaging biological tissues

Abstract

Imaging specimens over large scales and with a sub-micron resolution is instrumental to biomedical research. Yet, the number of pixels to form such an image usually exceeds the number of pixels provided by conventional cameras. While most microscopes are equipped with a motorized stage to displace the specimen and acquire the image tile-by-tile, we propose an alternative strategy that does not require any moving part in the sample plane. We propose to add a scanning mechanism in the detection unit of the microscope to collect sequentially different sub-areas of the field of view. Our approach, called remote scanning, is compatible with all camera-based microscopes. We evaluate the performances in both wide-field microscopy and full-field optical coherence tomography and we show that a field of view of 2.2 mm with 1.1 micron resolution can be achieved. We finally demonstrate that the method is especially suited to image biological samples such as millimetric engineered tissues.