High-speed single-exposure time-reversed ultrasonically encoded optical focusing against dynamic scattering

Focusing light deep inside live scattering tissue promises to revolutionize biophotonics by enabling deep tissue noninvasive optical imaging, manipulation, and therapy. By combining with guide stars, wavefront shaping is emerging as a powerful tool to make scattering media optically transparent. However, for in vivo biomedical applications, the speeds of existing techniques are still too slow to accommodate the fast speckle decorrelation of live tissue. To address this key bottleneck, we develop a quaternary phase encoding scheme to enable single-exposure time-reversed ultrasonically encode optical focusing with full-phase modulations. Specifically, we focus light inside dynamic scattering media with an average mode time down to 29 ns, which indicates that more than 10⁴ effective spatial modes can be controlled within 1 millisecond. With this technique, we demonstrate in vivo light focusing in between a highly opaque adult zebrafish of 5.1 millimeters in thickness and a ground glass diffuser. Our work presents an important step toward in vivo deep tissue applications of wavefront shaping.