Multidirectional digital scanned light-sheet microscopy enables uniform fluorescence excitation and contrast-enhanced imaging

Abstract Light-sheet fluorescence microscopy (LSFM) has emerged as a powerful method for rapid and optically efficient 3D microscopy. Initial LSFM designs utilized a static sheet of light, termed selective plane illumination microscopy (SPIM), which exhibited shadowing artifacts and deteriorated contrast due to light scattering. These issues have been addressed, in part, by multidirectional selective plane illumination microscopy (mSPIM), in which rotation of the light sheet is used to mitigate shadowing artifacts, and digital scanned light-sheet microscopy (DSLM), in which confocal line detection is used to reject scattered light. Here we present a simple passive multidirectional digital scanned light-sheet microscopy (mDSLM) architecture that combines the benefits of mSPIM and DSLM. By utilizing an elliptical Gaussian beam with increased angular diversity in the imaging plane, mDSLM provides shadow-free contrast-enhanced imaging of fluorescently labeled samples. One Sentence Summary Glaser et al. describe a light-sheet microscopy architecture that enables passive multidirectional illumination with confocal line detection to enable both uniform fluorescence excitation and contrast-enhanced imaging of fluorescently labeled samples.