Fluorescence sectioning micro-endoscopy using hybrid illumination

Abstract

© COPYRIGHT SPIE. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only. A widefield endoscope with optical sectioning capability using digital micro-mirror device (DMD) is proposed and demonstrated. With the addition of DMD, uniform and grid illumination pattern can be created for HiLo algorithm to remove out-of-focus noise in widefield images. By applying spectral filters to raw images, high frequency in-focus component of uniform illumination image and low frequency in-focus component of grid illumination image can be extracted, respectively. An in-focus image with full resolution can then be reconstructed by combining these two images. To verify the optical sectioning capability of the proposed system, 45μm fluorescent beads and mouse heart tissues were observed. The improvement of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) can be obviously seen from the results.