Extended Depth of Focus Two-Photon Light-Sheet Microscopy for In Vivo Fluorescence Imaging of Large Multicellular Organisms at Cellular Resolution

Two-photon excitation in light-sheet microscopy advances applications to live imaging of multicellular organisms. In a previous study, we developed a two-photon Bessel beam light-sheet microscope with a nearly 1-mm field of view and less than 4-μm axial resolution, using a low magnification (10×), middle numerical aperture (NA 0.5) detection objective. In this study, we aimed to construct a light-sheet microscope with higher resolution imaging while maintaining the large field of view, using low magnification (16×) with a high NA 0.8 objective. To address potential illumination and detection mismatch, we investigated the use of a depth of focus (DOF) extension method. Specifically, we used a stair-step device composed of five-layer annular zones that extended DOF two-fold, enough to cover the light-sheet thickness. Resolution measurements using fluorescent beads showed that the reduction in resolutions was small. We then applied this system to in vivo imaging of medaka fish and found that image quality degradation at the distal site of the beam injection could be compensated. This demonstrates that the extended DOF system combined with wide-field two-photon light-sheet microscopy offers a simple and easy setup for live imaging application of large multicellular organism specimens with sub-cellular resolution.