Spatially variant PSF modeling in confocal macroscopy

Abstract

Point spread function (PSF) plays an essential role in image reconstruction. In the context of confocal microscopy, optical performance degrades towards the edge of the field of view as astigmatism, coma and vignetting. Thus, one should expect the related artifacts to be even stronger in macroscopy, where the field of view is much larger. The field aberrations in macroscopy fluorescence imaging system was observed to be symmetrical and to increase with the distance from the center of the field of view. In this paper we propose an experiment and an optimization method for assessing the center of the field of view. The obtained results constitute a step towards reducing the number of parameters in macroscopy PSF model.