Two-photon microscopy is a powerful tool for in vivo brain imaging that has greatly facilitated the neuroscience research in the past few decades. However, it still remains a challenge to image deep inside the brain with near diffraction-limited resolution due to the optical aberrations induced by the biological tissue and the cranial window. Here, we used an adaptive optics approach based on direct wavefront sensing to correct the aberration induced by the thinned skull window and achieved minimally invasive imaging of cerebral cortex with near-diffraction-limit resolution. Besides, by compensating the intrinsic aberration of a miniature gradient-index lens that implanted into the brain, two-photon imaging of hippocampal dendritic spines was realized over an extended field of view. The improvement in fluorescence intensity and imaging resolution enabled us to resolve the fine structures in live mouse brain such as dendritic spines that were invisible without the help of adaptive optics.

Date Published: 1 March 2019
PDF: 7 pages
Proc. SPIE 10865, Neural Imaging and Sensing 2019, 108650M (1 March 2019); doi: 10.1117/12.2509784

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 10865:
Neural Imaging and Sensing 2019
Qingming Luo; Jun Ding; Ling Fu, Editor(s)