Optical imaging techniques are widely used in biological research, but their penetration depth is limited by tissue scattering. Wavefront shaping techniques are able to overcome this problem in principle, but are often slow and their performance depends on the sample. This greatly reduces their practicability for biological applications. Here we present a scattering compensation technique based on three-photon (3P) excitation, which converges faster than comparable two-photon (2P) techniques and works reliably even on densely labeled samples, where 2P approaches fail. To demonstrate its usability and advantages for biomedical imaging we apply it to the imaging of dendritic spines on GFP-labeled layer 5 neurons in an anesthetized mouse.

Optica. 8:1613-1619 (2021)