Multi-focal serial-section 2-photon imaging

This recent pre-print by David Chen in the Myers lab describes a new serial-section 2p design (2p-COMB) which uses a multi-anode PMT to allow multi-plexed data acquistion. A beam splitter creates a linear array of 16 beams, which are scanned over the sample. The emitted fluorescence is de-scanned along one axis by a galvo and imaged onto a 16-anode PMT. This results in frames rates of over 450 FPS. A volume ~5 mm × 7 mm × 3 mm can imaged in about 11 hours.

To help reduce noise caused by the low SNR of the short dwell-time data, the authors employed content-aware image restoration (CARE)