Scattering Assisted Imaging

Abstract

An ideal imaging system provides a spatial resolution that is ultimately dictated by the numerical aperture (NA) of the illumination and collection optics. In biological tissue, resolution is further affected by scattering limiting the penetration depth to a few tenths of microns. Here, we exploit the properties of speckle patterns embedded into a strongly scattering matrix to generate a high-resolution illumination. Combining adaptive optics with a custom deconvolution algorithm, we obtain an increase in the transverse spatial resolution by a factor of 2.5 with respect to the diffraction limit. This Scattering Assisted Imaging (SAI) is compatible with long working distance optics and perfectly works on tissue, potentially paving the way to bulk imaging in turbid samples.