Point spread function engineering in confocal scanning microscopy

Confocal scanning microscopes are imaging systems that are mainly featured by their unique depth-discrimination ca-pacity when imaging three-dimensional objects. Along the past few years, our research group has done several attempts to improve their axial resolution by means of the so-called point-spread-function (PSF) engineering method. That is, by designing diffractive elements that properly shape the PSF. Our PSF engineering techniques have been designed to work in the nonparaxial regime and are applied both to bright-field and single-photon fluorescence confocal micros-copy, and also to more elaborated architectures like 4Pi confocal microscopy