Multimodal optical setup for nonlinear and fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopies: improvement on a commercial confocal inverted microscope

In this work we proposed and built a multimodal optical setup that extends a commercially available confocal microscope (Olympus FV300) to include nonlinear optical (NLO) microscopy and fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy (FLIM). The NLO microscopies included two-photon fluorescence (TPFE), Second Harmonic Generation (SHG) and Third Harmonic Generation (THG). The whole system, including FLIM, used only one laser source composed of an 80 MHz femtosecond laser. The commercial Ti:sapphire lasers can be tuned up to 690-1040 nm bringing the THG signal to the 350 nm region where most microscope optics do not work. However, the third harmonic is only generated at the sample, meaning that we only have to take care of the collection optics. To do that we used a remote photomultiplier to acquire the THG signal at the 310-350 nm wavelength window. After performing the tests to guarantee that we are observing actually SHG/THG signals we than used this system to acquire multimodal images of several biological samples, from epithelial cancer to vegetables. The ability to see the collagen network together with the cell nuclei proved to be important for cancer tissues diagnosis. Moreover, FLIM provides information about the cell metabolism, also very important for cancer cell processes.