Second harmonic generation microscopy (SHG) is generally acknowledged as a powerful tool for the label-free three-dimensional visualization of tissues and advanced materials, with one of its most popular applications being collagen imaging. Despite the great need, progress in super-resolved SHG imaging lags behind the developments reported over the past years in fluorescence-based optical nanoscopy. In this work, we demonstrate super-resolved re-scan SHG, qualitatively and quantitatively showing on collagenous tissues the available resolution advantage over the diffraction limit. We introduce as well super-resolved re-scan two-photon excited fluorescence microscopy, an imaging modality not explored to date.
Keywords: second harmonic generation; super-resolved optical imaging; two-photon excited fluorescence.