Very interesting stuff from the people at MIT regarding imaging through scattering media. Recently, multiple approaches taking advantage of temporal focusing (TF) increased efficiency inside scattering media when using two-photon microscopy have been published, and this goes a step further.

Here, the authors use wide-field structured illumination, in combination with TF, to obtain images with a large field-of-view and a slow number of camera acquisitions. To do so, they sequentially project a set of random structured patterns using a digital micromirror device (DMD). Using the pictures acquired for each illumination pattern in combination with the point-spread-function (PSF) of the imaging system allows to recover images of different biological samples without the typical scattering blur.

Optical design and working principle of the system. Figure extracted from “De-scattering with Excitation Patterning (DEEP) Enables Rapid Wide-field Imaging Through Scattering Media,” Dushan N. Wadduwage et al., at https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.10737

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

by Dushan N. Wadduwage et al., at arXiv.

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.