Fast finite difference solver for optical microscopy in deep biological tissue

Opt Lett. 2024 Aug 1;49(15):4417-4420. doi: 10.1364/OL.522382.

Abstract

Optical scattering poses a significant challenge to high-resolution microscopy within deep tissue. To accurately predict the performance of various microscopy techniques in thick samples, we present a computational model that efficiently solves Maxwell's equation in highly scattering media. This toolkit simulates the deterioration of the laser beam point spread function (PSF) without making a paraxial approximation, enabling accurate modeling of high-numerical-aperture (NA) objective lenses commonly employed in experiments. Moreover, this framework is applicable to a broad range of scanning microscopy techniques including confocal microscopy, stimulated emission depletion (STED) microscopy, and ground-state depletion microscopy. Notably, the proposed method requires only readily obtainable macroscopic tissue parameters. As a practical demonstration, we investigate the performance of Laguerre-Gaussian (LG) versus Hermite-Gaussian (HG) depletion beams in STED microscopy.

MeSH terms

  • Microscopy* / methods
  • Microscopy, Confocal / methods
  • Optical Phenomena
  • Scattering, Radiation