Improvement of the optical imaging technique for intact rat brain using a plano-concave lens

Use of a plano-concave lens improved the quality of optical signals from the rat cerebral cortex by improving the focus. When detecting neural activity from a curved surface of an in vivo brain by optical techniques, it is not possible to adjust the focus equally over the entire detecting area in the two-dimensional plane, since the active window of the optical detector is usually flat, while the intact brain surface is spherical. It has been known that the size of the optical signal is reduced as the distance of the real image to the active window of the detector increases; therefore, the level of the signal-to-noise ratio obtained from the unfocused area often becomes insufficient for quantitative physiological analyses. By placing a plano-concave lens on the cerebral cortex, we succeeded in obtaining a two-dimensional image that has no unfocused area over an entire image recorded by the detector.