Microscope Focus Drift Literature References

Despite the wide variety of technological advances that have occurred in optical microscopy during the past few years, axial fluctuations manifested by slow changes to specimen focus over the course of time-lapse imaging remains a significant problem. The term focus drift is often used to describe the inability of a microscope to maintain the selected focal plane over an extended period of time. This artifact occurs independently of the natural motion in living specimens and is primarily affected by a number of contributing factors. In general, focus drift is more of a problem when using high magnification and numerical aperture oil immersion objectives (having a very shallow depth of focus) than it is for lower magnification (10x and 20x) objectives with wider focal depths.

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Focus Drift in Optical Microscopy

Introduction