Real-time optical gating for three-dimensional beating heart imaging

3D adaptive optics in a light sheet microscope

“…The main point here is that we have successfully demonstrated AO in SPIM, and also shown how it is a useful way of characterizing the aberrations as a function of depth. In a future paper we aim to show the combination of AO, as described in this paper, with our heart sycnhronization system [18] in order to demonstrate AO corrected images within the living heart. Further improvements may be possible with the addition of AO on the illumination arm of a SPIM system to maximize the optical sectioning capability throughout the sample and potentially to use point spread function engineering of the light path for improved resolution.…”

“…Our interest is in the imaging of the heart, which is further complicated by the fact that it is moving. We previously demonstrated 3D reconstruction of a living, beating heart using SPIM, using real-time optical gating to record images at a consistent phase in the heart cycle [18]. To the best of our knowledge, there have been no published results on SPIM and AO, although alternative techniques such as post-processing deconvolution [19] or structured illumination [20] have been implemented to improve the contrast and resolution.…”

Microscopy without imaging: compressive sensing for heart-synchronized imaging

“…In our case our desired quantity is the phase of the heart, which is a highly nonlinear function of the input data. We wish to make a small number of measurements of our object in a suitable basis, and process these using a target recognition algorithm that can determine the heartbeat phase as a function of time [3]. Our algorithms can then make forward predictions of when the heart will be at the correct point in its cycle, and trigger acquisition of a heartbeat-stabilized fluorescence image.…”

“…For example, a target recognition problem may require an object to be classified into one of a small number of categories [1], we may require an estimate of local motion in a scene [2], or we may wish to phase-lock to a periodically-moving structure such as the heart [3]. This latter scenario is the focus of the present manuscript: we will show how complex information can be calculated directly from a small number of compressive single-pixel measurements.…”

“…In this scenario, the conventional approach involves acquiring microscope images in transmission mode, which are then are analyzed to determine the "phase" of the heartbeat as a function of time. This information is used to generate electronic signals to trigger acquisition of fluorescence images at the correct point in the heartbeat [3]. However, instead we will directly analyze 7 single-pixel measurement channels, a sufficiently low number that it would be impossible to reconstruct anything remote resembling an image of the scene, and yet we will show that we can derive accurate phase information from these massively sub-sampled measurements.…”