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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2019 Jun 1.
Published in final edited form as: Curr Opin Neurobiol. 2018 Feb 7;50:83–91. doi: 10.1016/j.conb.2018.01.011

Figure 1.

Figure 1

The effect of aberrations on image quality. (a) An aberration-free wavefront leads to a diffraction-limited focal spot in a point-scanning (e.g. two-photon fluorescence) microscope. (b) Specimen refractive index mismatches distort the wavefront of the excitation light, leading to a dim, enlarged focus. (c) Optimal imaging performance can be recovered by pre-shaping the wavefront of the excitation light to cancel out the specimen-induced aberration. The sinusoidal curves denote the phase relationship among the rays. Axial images obtained from two-photon excitation of 1-µm fluorescent red beads are shown for three different cases: (a) ideal, aberration-free imaging conditions, (b) an artificial aberration is introduced, causing a 8.6-fold decrease in brightness and a degradation of axial resolution, and (c) adaptive optics is used to recover ideal imaging performance.