Motion compensation for in vivo subcellular optical microscopy

Abstract

In this review we focus on the impact of tissue motion on attempting to conduct sub-cellular resolution optical microscopy, in vivo. Our position is that tissue motion is one of the major barriers to conducting these studies along with light induced damage, optical probe loading as well as absorbance and scattering effects on the excitation point spread function and collection of emitted light. Recent developments in the speed of image acquisition have reached the limit, in most cases, where the signal from a sub-cellular voxel limits the speed and not the scanning rate of the microscope. Different schemes for compensating for tissue displacements due to rigid body and deformation are presented from tissue restriction, gating, adaptive gating and active tissue tracking. We argue that methods that minimally impact the natural physiological motion of the tissue are desirable since the major reason to perform in vivo studies is to evaluate normal physiological functions. Towards this goal, the methods for active tracking using the optical imaging data itself to monitor tissue displacement and actively move the FOV of the microscope to match the tissue deformation in near real time. Critical for this development was the implementation of near real time image processing in conjunction with the control of the microscope imaging parameters. Clearly the continuing development of methods of motion compensation as well as significant technological solutions to the other barriers to tissue sub-cellular optical imaging in vivo, including optical aberrations and overall signal to noise, will make major contributions to the understanding of cell biology within the body.

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