Aberration correction during real time in vivo imaging of bone marrow with sensorless adaptive optics confocal microscope

Abstract

We have demonstrated adaptive correction of specimen-induced aberration during in vivo imaging of mouse bone marrow vasculature with confocal fluorescence microscopy. Adaptive optics system was completed with wavefront sensorless correction scheme based on stochastic parallel gradient descent algorithm. Using image sharpness as the optimization metric, aberration correction was performed based upon Zernike polynomial modes. The experimental results revealed the improved signal and resolution leading to a substantially enhanced image contrast with aberration correction. The image quality of vessels at 38- and 75-μm depth increased three times and two times, respectively. The corrections allowed us to detect clearer bone marrow vasculature structures at greater contrast and improve the signal-to-noise ratio.