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We develop a confocal system equipped with optimal elliptical apertures to improve axial point spread function and signal‐to‐background ratio (SBR) for different detector sizes. By adjusting the parameters of the elliptical apertures, the axial half width at half‐maximum can be reduced to 4.986 (described in optical coordinates) and SBR can be improved to 0.176. We evaluate this system with the 1951 USAF resolution test chart and the primary cultured neuron from SD rat stained by Map‐2, and observe better imaging performance, which indicates the potential applications in biological science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adaptive optics has been widely used in the optical microscopy to recover high‐resolution images deep into the sample. However, the corrected field of view (FOV) with a single correction is generally limited, which seriously restricts the imaging speed. In this article, we demonstrate a high‐speed wavefront correction method by using the conjugate adaptive optical correction with multiple guide stars (CAOMG) based on the coherent optical adaptive technique. The results show that the CAOMG method can greatly improve the corrected FOV. For 120‐μm‐thick mouse brain tissue, the corrected FOV can be improved up to ~243 times of the conventional pupil adaptive optics (PAO) without additional time consumption. Therefore, this study shows the potential of high‐speed imaging through scattering medium in biological science. Imaging results of fluorescent beads through mouse brain tissue in a 250 × 250 μm2 FOV, after PAO correction (left) and conjugate adaptive optics correction with five guide stars (right). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]