Fast and accurate aberration estimation from 3D bead images using convolutional neural networks

Estimating optical aberrations from volumetric intensity images is a key step in sensorless adaptive optics for microscopy. Here we describe a method (PHASENET) for fast and accurate aberration measurement from experimentally acquired 3D bead images using convolutional neural networks. Importantly, we show that networks trained only on synthetically generated data can successfully predict aberrations from experimental images. We demonstrate our approach on two data sets acquired with different microscopy modalities and find that PHASENET yields results better than or comparable to classical methods while being orders of magnitude faster. We furthermore show that the number of focal planes required for satisfactory prediction is related to different symmetry groups of Zernike modes. PHASENET is freely available as open-source software in Python.