A new imaging technique creates microscopic three-dimensional views of tissues within a patient’s body and can update those images several times a second. The technology could be a boon for guided surgery, in which doctors use computer-generated images of hard-to-see areas in the body to perform delicate operations, such as cutting out brain tumors.
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Optical microscopes normally have a shallow depth of field, so only a thin slice of tissue is in focus at any time. But now Tyler Ralston of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and his colleagues have extracted information from light passing through out-of-focus areas and used it to construct sharp images on a computer. The result is a 3-D view that shows the entire tissue in focus, Ralston’s group reports in the February Nature Physics.