There’s a promising new way to improve image quality and correct for the inevitable aberrations in high-resolution microscopy. Adaptive optics for microscopy.
Choosing high-quality optics enables you to improve your image quality and produce high-resolution microscope images. But even if you’re working with optical components that are ideal and perfect in every sense, there are some aberrations that won’t go away. These are the aberrations caused by the spatial variations in the refractive index of the specimens being studied. The deeper the tissue being imaged, the worse the problem gets.
Adaptive optics involves a range of techniques that enable you to correct for these aberrations before the image is produced, making high-resolution and even super-resolution imaging possible in tissue as deep as tens or hundreds of micrometers.
Here we’ll look at just how adaptive optics work to make high-quality microscopy possible even with deep tissue imaging.