title: Rejection of two-photon fluorescence background in thick tissue by differential aberration imaging.
abstract: We present a simple and robust way to reject out-of-focus background when performing deep two-photon excited fluorescence (TPEF) imaging in thick tissue. The technique is based on the use of a deformable mirror (DM) to introduce illumination aberrations that preferentially degrade TPEF signal while leaving TPEF background relatively unchanged. A subtraction of aberrated from unaberrated images leads to background rejection. We present a heuristic description of our technique, which we corroborate with experiment. An added benefit of our technique is that it leads to somewhat improved image resolution.
authors.affiliation: Department of Biomedical Engineering, Boston University, 44 Cummington St., Boston, MA 02215, USA. aleray@bu.edu
authors.forename: Aymeric
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Leray
authors.forename: Jerome
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Mertz