Multiphoton microscopy has become a powerful tool for imaging the intact mammalian brain, however, tissue scattering, optical aberrations and motion artifacts degrade the imaging performance at depth. Here we developed a minimally invasive intravital imaging methodology based on three-photon excitation, indirect adaptive optics (AO) and active electrocardiogram gating to advance deep-tissue imaging. We demonstrate near-diffraction-limited imaging of deep cortical spines and (sub-)cortical dendrites up to a depth of 1.4 mm in the mouse hippocampus, as well as deep-layer calcium imaging of astrocytes that reside in the highly scattering corpus callosum.
|