Depth-adapted adaptive optics for three-photon microscopy

Abstract

Three-photon (3-P) fluorescence microscopy enables deep in vivo imaging with subcellular resolution, but its performance is fundamentally constrained by the maximum permissible laser power required to avoid tissue heating and photodamage. Under these power-limited conditions, fluorescence signal generation, image contrast, and achievable imaging depth are strongly affected by the illumination beam profile and aberration correction strategy. In this paper, we showed that using a fixed illumination beam size was suboptimal across different imaging depths. We further showed that conventional Zernike-based adaptive optics (AO) correction degrades under reduced Gaussian illumination beam sizes due to loss of modal orthogonality. This degradation results in slow convergence, unintended focal and field-of-view shifts, and excessive wavefront deformations. To overcome these limitations, we introduced a depth-adapted AO framework in which both the illumination beam profile and the aberration correction basis were dynamically matched to the imaging conditions. By combining depth-optimised beam underfilling with a bespoke set of illumination-matched aberration modes, we achieved faster and more stable AO convergence, enhanced fluorescence signal and image quality during deep in vivo multi-channel neuroimaging. Together, these results established a practical and robust AO-enabled three-photon microscopy strategy that maximised imaging performance under realistic power constraints.