Highly Sensitive Shack-Hartmann Wavefront Sensor: Application to Non-Transparent Tissue Mimic Imaging with Adaptive Light-Sheet Fluorescence Microscopy.

High-quality in-depth imaging of three-dimensional samples remains a major challenge in modern microscopy. Selective plane illumination microscopy (SPIM) is a widely used technique that enables imaging of living tissues with subcellular resolution. However, scattering, absorption, and optical aberrations limit the depth at which useful imaging can be done. Adaptive optics (AOs) is a method capable of measuring and correcting aberrations in different kinds of fluorescence microscopes, thereby improving the performance of the optical system. We have incorporated a wavefront sensor adaptive optics scheme to SPIM (WAOSPIM) to correct aberrations induced by optically-thick samples, such as multi-cellular tumor spheroids (MCTS). Two-photon fluorescence provides us with a tool to produce a weak non-linear guide star (NGS) in any region of the field of view. The faintness of NGS; however, led us to develop a high-sensitivity Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor (SHWS). This paper describes this newly developed SHWS and shows the correction capabilities of WAOSPIM using NGS in thick, inhomogeneous samples like MCTS. We report improvements of up to 79% for spatial frequencies corresponding to cellular and subcellular size features.

High-resolution in-depth imaging of optically cleared thick samples using an adaptive SPIM.

Today, Light Sheet Fluorescence Microscopy (LSFM) makes it possible to image fluorescent samples through depths of several hundreds of microns. However, LSFM also suffers from scattering, absorption and optical aberrations. Spatial variations in the refractive index inside the samples cause major changes to the light path resulting in loss of signal and contrast in the deepest regions, thus impairing in-depth imaging capability. These effects are particularly marked when inhomogeneous, complex biological samples are under study. Recently, chemical treatments have been developed to render a sample transparent by homogenizing its refractive index (RI), consequently enabling a reduction of scattering phenomena and a simplification of optical aberration patterns. One drawback of these methods is that the resulting RI of cleared samples does not match the working RI medium generally used for LSFM lenses. This RI mismatch leads to the presence of low-order aberrations and therefore to a significant degradation of image quality. In this paper, we introduce an original optical-chemical combined method based on an adaptive SPIM and a water-based clearing protocol enabling compensation for aberrations arising from RI mismatches induced by optical clearing methods and acquisition of high-resolution in-depth images of optically cleared complex thick samples such as Multi-Cellular Tumour Spheroids.