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Engineers and scientists operating in fields such as neurophotonics, remote sensing, medicine, or even industrial manufacturing are often tasked with building or modifying imaging systems for customized applications. They must often resort to expert advice from optical designers to obtain clear and quantitative answers to their specific optics problems. Optical designers, with their knowledge and specialized software tools such as Zemax, Oslo, or CODE V, can indeed provide these answers. However, third-party expert advice can be prohibitively expensive, difficult to interpret without basic knowledge, and can lead to sub-optimal solutions if the requirements are miscommunicated to the external consultant. 

For the general engineer, scientist, and especially for trainees, learning these professional software tools is often not an option because of the abundance of features targeted to advanced optical designers that end up confusing trainees and non-experts alike.

Yet, there should be a solution, between simplified analytical solutions and expert tools that can help non-experts tackle moderately complicated problems by themselves to obtain quantitative answers. It is therefore the purpose of the present tutorial to provide both the knowledge and the tools for this audience.

“Tools and tutorial on practical ray tracing for microscopy”, by V. Pineau Noël¹, S. Masoumi¹, E. Parham¹, G. Genest, L. Bégin, M.-A. Vigneault, D. C. Côté, Neurophotonics, 8(1), 010801 (2021).  ¹Equal contributions. 

• To read the entire article: https://doi.org/10.1117/1.NPh.8.1.010801
• Prof. Daniel Côté