3D printed lenslet arrays for MEMS-enabled multifocal structured illumination microscopy

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Christopher, Jay and Butterworth, Charlie and Rooney, Liam M. and McConnell, Gail and Bauer, Ralf; (2025) 3D printed lenslet arrays for MEMS-enabled multifocal structured illumination microscopy. In: IEEE International conference on Optical MEMS and Nanophotonics (OMN) 2025. 2025 International Conference on Optical MEMS and Nanophotonics (OMN) . IEEE, THA. ISBN 979-8-3315-9922-5 (https://doi.org/10.1109/OMN65869.2025.11125977)

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Abstract

A multifocal structured illumination microscope (mSIM) was constructed using a MEMS scanner and 3D printed lenslet array elements to evaluate the use of non-imaging 3D printed optics for super-resolution microscopy applications. The lenslet arrays functioning as the core optical element were a high-end glass commercial lenslet array with 250 µm pitch lenslets and a custom ‘honeycomb’ geometry 3D printed lenslet array with 1.2 mm pitch lenslets. Compared to traditional widefield images, the custom mSIM setup exemplified a 1.4x and a 1.3x actin filament contrast improvement when imaging the biological features using the commercial glass array and the custom 3D printed element respectively. This exemplifies that within a low-cost mSIM system and without the addition of image deconvolution, 3D printed optics can provide simple and tailorable solutions to obtain ~√2 spatial resolution improvements to standard widefield or laser-scanned imaging methods.

ORCID iDs

Christopher, Jay ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0009-0707-8947, Butterworth, Charlie ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0000-0380-0642, Rooney, Liam M. ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2237-501X, McConnell, Gail ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7213-0686 and Bauer, Ralf ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7927-9435;
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