Confocal line scanning of a Bessel beam for fast 3D imaging

We have developed a light-sheet illumination microscope that can perform fast 3D imaging of transparent biological samples with inexpensive visible lasers and a single galvo mirror (GM). The light-sheet is created by raster scanning a Bessel beam with a GM, with this same GM also being used to rescan the fluorescence across a chip of a camera to construct an image in real time. A slit is used to reject out-of-focus fluorescence such that the image formed in real time has minimal contribution from the sidelobes of the Bessel beam. Compared with two-photon Bessel beam excitation or other confocal line-scanning approaches, our method is of lower cost, is simpler, and does not require calibration and synchronization of multiple GMs. We demonstrated the optical sectioning and out-of-focus background rejection capabilities of this microscope by imaging fluorescently labeled actin filaments in fixed 3T3 cells.