The wide-field optical sectioning of microlens array and structured illumination-based plane-projection multiphoton microscopy

We present a theoretical investigation of an optical microscope design that achieves wide-field, multiphoton fluorescence microscopy with finer axial resolution than confocal microscopy. Our technique creates a thin plane of excitation light at the sample using height-staggered microlens arrays (HSMAs), wherein the height staggering of microlenses generate temporal focusing to suppress out-of-focus excitation, and the dense spacing of microlenses enables the implementation of structured illumination technique to eliminate residual out-of-focus signal. We use physical optics-based numerical simulations to demonstrate that our proposed technique can achieve diffraction-limited three-dimensional imaging through a simple optical design. (C) 2013 Optical Society of America