Quasi-confocal fluorescence sectioning with dynamic speckle illumination.

We present a simple modification to a conventional wide-field fluorescence microscope that provides depth discrimination in thick tissues. The technique consists of illuminating a sample with a sequence of independent speckle patterns and displaying the rms of the resultant sequence of fluorescence images. The advantage of speckle illumination is that it provides diffraction-limited illumination granularity that is highly contrasted even in scattering media. We demonstrate quasi-confocal imaging in a mouse olfactory bulb labeled with green fluorescent protein.