Selective illumination on line-scanning confocal mesoscope enhances background rejection in cortex-wide mouse brain imaging

Abstract

Confocal microscope has optical sectioning that is accessible for structural and dynamic imaging in in vivo mouse brain. With the requirement of brain-wide field-of-view (FOV) in many neuroscience researches, existing confocal microscope fails to fulfill the requirement. Here, we proposed the brain-wide, high resolution line-scan confocal mesoscope (LSCM) for in vivo mouse imaging, achieving 6.6-mm-FOV, 3.2-m-resolution and video-rate acquisition. To further enhance the background rejection ability, we introduced the selective illumination method into our system. We demonstrated that the proposed technique is s able to image the neurodynamics in in vivo mouse brain. Comparing to the LSCM and wide-field mesoscope, our selective illumination line-scan confocal mesoscope improves more than 25% and 3 times background rejection ability, respectively.