ABSTRACT
A laser microscope is a microscope optical system that uses a laser as the illumination source. Very briefly, lasers were introduced to the field of microscopy in the mid-1960s [1], and confocal scanning laser microscopes were disclosed in the late 1960s [2,3]. The concept of scanning meant the displacement of the laser beam cross section over the specimen to be observed [4]. An additional illumination approach in scanning laser microscopy is near-field laser illumination [5,6].
