Reflecting optical system to increase signal intensity in confocal microscopy

In fluorescence mode confocal microscopes, only 0.02% of emitted signal can be detected in best case. So, we proposed reflecting optical system to increase signal intensity detected in photon detector. In this paper, we evaluate the proposed reflecting optical system using optical transfer function. To evaluate the proposed system, we used the modeling method based on wave optics. We first calculated point spread function of total system, and calculated optical transfer function of total system. When we use the proposed reflecting optical system, we can increase the signal intensity detected in photon detector. Amount of increased signal intensity depends on the ratio of NA of objective in the original confocal microscopy to NA of objective in reflecting optical system. We also simulated axial response of total system. FWHM of axial response increased a little when using reflecting optical system. The amount of increased FWHM also depends on the ratio of NA, mentioned above. Maximum increase in FWHM of axial response is about 5%.