High-quality in-depth imaging of three-dimensional samples remains a major challenge in modern microscopy. Selective plane illumination microscopy (SPIM) is a widely used technique that enables imaging of living tissues with subcellular resolution. However, scattering, absorption, and optical aberrations limit the depth at which useful imaging can be done. Adaptive optics (AOs) is a method capable of measuring and correcting aberrations in different kinds of fluorescence microscopes, thereby improving the performance of the optical system. We have incorporated a wavefront sensor adaptive optics scheme to SPIM (WAOSPIM) to correct aberrations induced by optically-thick samples, such as multi-cellular tumor spheroids (MCTS). Two-photon fluorescence provides us with a tool to produce a weak non-linear guide star (NGS) in any region of the field of view. The faintness of NGS; however, led us to develop a high-sensitivity Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor (SHWS). This paper describes this newly developed SHWS and shows the correction capabilities of WAOSPIM using NGS in thick, inhomogeneous samples like MCTS. We report improvements of up to 79% for spatial frequencies corresponding to cellular and subcellular size features.
Keywords: adaptive optics; highly-sensitive Shack–Hartmann; light-sheet fluorescence microscopy; tissue mimics.