Beam deflection scanning for laser confocal microscopy

To improve the scanning speed of the laser confocal system, a field synchronous scanning method was proposed. The laser confocal microscopy system was implemented with a GVS002 two-dimensional galvanometer from the THORLABS Company. The scanning waveforms of galvanometer were calculated in accordance with the parameters and scanning range of the optical system. The synchronous scanning waveform was output from a PCIe6353 multi-functional data acquisition card of NI Company. Meanwhile, it collected the optical intensity signals at the pinhole at the focus of the confocal microscopy system and scans a 256×256 image and a 512×512 image successively, recording the scanning images and imaging time; then, the scanning waveforms were output in field synchronization under the same hardware structures, recording the scanning images and imaging time. The experimental results show that the speed of the 256×256 image scanning through field synchronization can be increased by 10 times and the speed of the 512×512 image scanning can be increased by 5 times. In addition the field synchronous scanning can meet such requirements of the confocal microscopy imaging as the clearness and strong capacity of resisting disturbance. Compared with the line synchronization scanning, the field synchronous scanning can eliminate the retention time during the line to line conversion and significantly improve the scanning speed without changing the hardware.