Limiting the incident NA for efficient wavefront shaping through thin anisotropic scattering media

Wave front shaping holds great potential for high-resolution imaging or light delivery either through or deep inside living tissue. However, one of the biggest barriers that must be overcome to unleash the full potential of wavefront shaping for practical biomedical applications is the fact that wavefront shaping, especially based on iterative feedback, requires lengthy measurements to obtain useful correction of the output wavefront. As biological tissues are inherently dynamic, the short decorrelation time sets a limit on the achievable wavefront shaping enhancement. Here we show that for wavefront shaping in thin anisotropic scattering media such as biological tissues, we can optimize the wavefront shaping quality by simply limiting the numerical aperture (NA) of the incident wavefront. Using the same number of controlled modes, and therefore the same wavefront measurement time, we demonstrate that the wavefront shaped focus peak to background ratio can be increased by a factor of 2.1 while the energy delivery throughput can be increased by a factor of 8.9 through 710 mu m thick brain tissue by just limiting the incident NA. (C) 2021 Optical Society of America under the terms of the OSA Open Access Publishing Agreement

Automated summary

Wavefront shaping has great potential for practical biomedical applications, and by limiting the numerical aperture of the incident wavefront, the quality of wavefront shaping can be optimized to increase focus peak to background ratio and energy delivery throughput.