Fig. 2.

Simulated performance trade-offs of the Cubic-phase extended Depth of Field (EDOF) imaging system relative to the conventional microscope (abbreviated here as conv.). The relative intensity of the dominant peak in the PSF is mapped out as a function of both defocus (Ψ) and cubic-phase modulation (α) in Panel A showing that the cubic phase mask decreases attenuation with defocus. The relative width of the dominant lobe in the Cubic-phase PSF is shown in Panel B when compared with the in-focus conventional PSF, where σ is the width of a Gaussian fit to the PSF. The width of the dominant peak is shown to increase with a greater cubic-modulation coefficient. The relative intensity of the dominant lobe of the cubic-phase PSF compared with the conventional PSF with the same defocus is shown in Panel C. This shows that the uniformity of the cubic-phase PSF dominant lobe intensity indicated in Panel A will rapidly provide better out-of-focus signal localization when compared with the conventional imaging system.