A fundamentally different approach is described below: multibeam scanning. While some applications, such as deep tissue imaging require use of large amounts of power to compensate for scattering, many other applications use as little as 1/20th of the available laser power in order to keep single beam power below threshold for saturation and photodamage. To more efficiently utilize the available laser power in such circumstances we developed a multibeam approach in which the source laser is split into multiple beamlets using a diffractive element (Watson et al., 2009). These many beamlets are then simultaneously directed to different parts of the tissue (Sacconi et al., 2003, Watson et al., 2009). This allows use of the full power of the laser to either speed up imaging (similar to multibeam confocal imaging described above) or to increase sampling per frame and therefore signal-to-noise ratio.