Application of adaptive lenses in confocal microscopy

Confocal microscopy (CM) is a powerful imaging technique that is widely used in life-sciences and surface analysis. The depth sectioning capability introduced by the pinhole based point-wise detection leads to suppression of out-of focus light, which is one reason for the success and wide usage of CM. But the point-wise nature requires scanning in three dimensions to obtain 3D information. Axial scans are commonly performed by mechanically translating either the samples or the objectives. This places a bottle-neck on the achievable scan-rate. The adaptive lens based approach of our confocal microscope with adaptive lenses (CAL) bears the potential to improve the axial scanning mechanism. Although the scan rates of common adaptive lenses are in the time scales of nowadays fastest mechanical scanners, the progress of adaptive lenses in terms of image quality and speed promises to enable fast axial scans at hundreds of kHz. In this contribution we analyze the performance of our current CAL system and discuss limitations of the CAL approach. We also show experimentally that the adaptive scans offer an increased flexibility. First measurements on Zebrafish embryos are presented.