High-speed single-shot optical focusing through dynamic turbid media

Abstract

In biological applications, optical focusing is limited by the diffusion of light, which prevents focusing at depths greater than ~1 mm in soft tissue. Wavefront shaping aims to extend the focusing depth by compensating for phase distortions induced by scattering. This allows for focusing light through biological tissue beyond the optical diffusion limit through constructive interference. However, due to random motion, scattering of light in tissue is deterministic only within a brief speckle correlation time. In in vivo tissue this speckle correlation time is on the order of milliseconds, thus it is vital to optimize the wavefront within the correlation time. The speed of wavefront shaping has typically been limited by the time required to measure and display the optimal phase pattern due to the low speeds of cameras, data transfer and processing, and spatial light modulators (SLM). While methods of binary-phase modulation requiring only two images for phase measurement have recently been reported, the majority of studies require a minimum of four frames for full-phase measurement. Here, we present a full-phase digital optical phase conjugation method based on off-axis holography for single-shot optical focusing through scattering media. By using off-axis holography in conjunction with graphics processing unit (GPU) based processing; we take advantage of single-shot full-phase measurement while using parallel computation to quickly reconstruct the phase map. Using this system, we are able to focus light through scattering media with a system latency of approximately 10 milliseconds, on the order of the in vivo speckle correlation time.