ASSEMBLY FOR INCREASING THE DEPTH DISCRIMINATION OF AN OPTICAL IMAGING SYSTEM

摘要

The invention relates to a method for increasing the depth of contrast during microscopic imaging. The method and implementation described can be designated as structured illumination, which creates quasi-confocal optical sections (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10). During the implementation of the method, a grid structure, located in the illumination field stop plane of a microscope, the object plane and the TV intermediate-image plane of a microscope are arranged "confocally" (4, 5, 6, 7, 9). The term "confocally" refers to the fact that the grid, object and the intermediate image plane are positioned on optically conjugated planes. This assembly enables the grid structure to be projected into the object plane of the microscope and the object, thus structured, to be reproduced on the TV intermediate-image plane using the following optical system. Optical sections are created by the calculation of the modulation depth of the structured object. The object is reproduced perpendicular to the direction of observation on several focus planes, to achieve a 3-dimensional registration of said object and is detected using an array-detector (e.g. CCD camera). The method and implementation of structured illumination described in this patent can primarily be used in the field of reflection and fluorescent microscopy. In principle, said method can be used for all linear interactions between light and matter. The use of the method is likewise not restricted to the field of microscopy.