Remote scanning for ultra-large field of view in wide-field microscopy and full-field OCT

Imaging specimens over large scales and with a sub-micron resolution is instrumental to biomedical research. Yet, the number of pixels to form such an image usually exceeds the number of pixels provided by conventional cameras. Although most microscopes are equipped with a motorized stage to displace the specimen and acquire the image tile-by-tile, we propose an alternative strategy that does not require to move any part in the sample plane. We propose to add a scanning mechanism in the detection unit of the microscope to collect sequentially different sub-areas of the field of view. Our approach, called remote scanning, is compatible with all camera-based microscopes. We evaluate the performances in both wide-field microscopy and full-field optical coherence tomography and we show that a field of view of 2.2 × 2.2 mm² with a 1.1 μm resolution can be acquired. We finally demonstrate that the method is especially suited to image motion-sensitive samples and large biological samples such as millimetric engineered tissues.