Phinden, Phaseform's sensorless adaptive optics software, is commercially available. It measures aberrations from the frames a microscope is already acquiring — no wavefront sensor, no additional hardware, no modification to the optical path — and applies the correction through a Deformable Phase Plate. Phinden was first shown at SPIE Photonics West in January and is now released, with integrations into five microscope control environments.

Correction from the image itself

A wavefront sensor is an instrument in its own right: it needs a beam split off the imaging path, its own optics, and a place to put them. Sensorless adaptive optics avoids all of that. Phinden applies a set of trial wavefronts through the DPP, scores each resulting frame against an image-quality metric, and converges on the correction that maximizes it. What it needs is the image — which the microscope produces anyway.

The practical consequence is that adaptive optics stops being a separate instrument and becomes a step in the acquisition: a few clicks, during the run, on the microscope already in the room.

It runs inside your microscope software

Phinden does not replace the software a laboratory already uses. It runs alongside it, negotiates the frames it needs, and sends the correction straight to the Delta 7 or PHI. Supported environments:

  • µManager
  • ZEISS ZEN blue
  • ScanImage (with MBF Bioscience)
  • Thorlabs ThorImage
  • LabVIEW, and directly from Python

An integration with Nikon NIS-Elements is in development.

Four field validations

Phinden has been run on other people's instruments, in four different modalities:

Phinden running on a Thorlabs Bergamo multiphoton microscope during a deep-tissue correction.
  • Single-molecule localization microscopy at the Institute of Applied Physics, TU Wien. Localization accuracy stands or falls with the symmetry of the point-spread function; Phinden corrects the sample-induced aberration while the localization run is acquiring, and the measured PSF goes from elongated and tilted to round.
  • Widefield fluorescence at the Life Imaging Center, University of Freiburg — spherical aberration induced by a deliberately wrong immersion medium, corrected up to the 6th-order spherical term.
  • Deep tissue at the DZNE, correcting through 420 µm of tissue.
  • Confocal Raman at the Medical University of Innsbruck — the first adaptive optics in a confocal Raman microscope, with signal enhancements up to 3.5-fold. That work is published in ACS Photonics.

Availability

Phinden ships separately from the hardware and runs with both the Delta 7 and PHI. Specifications and the download are on the Phinden product page.