Scientists Invent a Microscope That Can Safely Look Straight Through Your Skull - ScienceAlert

Thick, inconsistent structures like bone will scatter light unpredictably, making it difficult to figure out what's going on behind them.

There are plenty of options for researchers who are keen to watch living tissues do their thing, using clever optical tricks to turn scattered photons moving at certain frequencies into an image.

A team of scientists has now found a way to create a clear image from scattered infrared light emitted from a laser, even after it's passed through a thick layer of bone.

It's based on conventional laser-scanning confocal microscopy, except it detects light scattering not just at the depth being imaged, but also gets a complete input-output response of the light-medium interaction - its reflection-matrix.

The farther the light has to travel, the more those ballistic photons scatter out of the picture.