Active Optics Improve Microscope’s Field of View

Since the earliest explorations of the microscopic world in the 17th century and continuing to the present day, microscopists have continuously faced a challenge in that there is an inherent tradeoff between the resolution of the microscope and the size of the field of view. As the resolution of the microscope is increased to resolve smaller features, the observable area of the specimen decreases proportionally. While being a long recognized characteristic of the traditional microscope design, this tradeoff is becoming a significant hindrance as optical microscopes are being used in automated systems for advanced biotech research, medical diagnostics, robotic micromanipulation, and industrial inspection. More and more, these applications are requiring high throughput or challenging spatial-temporal observations where the small field size is often the source of a bottleneck in the process or prevents observation of the event of interest altogether. A new microscope design, called the Adaptive Scanning Optical Microscope (ASOM), uses a deformable mirror and a specially designed scanning configuration to effectively enlarge the field of view in optical microscopy. Exhibiting unique performance characteristics, the ASOM is particularly suitable for applications requiring dynamic or low fill factor observations over a wide field of view.