Adaptive Optics in Wide-Field Microscopy

Peter Kner (U. Georgia)
 
Three-dimensional live imaging in cell biology is hindered by optical 
aberrations which degrade the resolution and signal-to-noise ratio as
the focal plane is moved deeper into the sample. The solution to this 
problem is to use adaptive optics to correct the aberrations. In this 
talk, I will discuss our work on applying adaptive optics to wide-field 
fluorescence microscopy. We have demonstrated correction of depth 
aberrations and focusing using a deformable mirror in open-loop 
operation, and we have used phase retrieval as a wavefront sensing 
technique in closed-loop operation.