Spatially variant PSF modeling in confocal macroscopy

The point spread function (PSF) of imaging systems plays an essential role in image reconstruction. In the context of confocal microscopy, optical performance degrades towards the edge of the field of view. In confocal macroscopy, the related artifacts are even stronger, as the field of view is much larger. Because the related PSFs are strongly spatially variant, it is essential to be able to model them with few parameters. The field aberrations in fluorescence macroscopy were observed to be symmetrical and to increase with the distance from the center of the field of view. In this paper we propose an experiment and an optimization method for assessing the center of the field of view. The obtained results constitute an important step towards reducing the number of parameters in macroscopy PSF models.