Compressive fluorescence microscopy for biological and hyperspectral imaging

TLDR

Compressed sensing theory shows that signals can be reconstructed from far fewer measurements than their bandwidth, yet practical optical implementations remain largely unexplored. The study introduces a compressive‑sensing fluorescence microscope and demonstrates its use for biomedical imaging. The microscope employs dynamic structured wide‑field illumination paired with a fast, sensitive single‑point detector, enabling reconstruction of fluorescent bead, cell, and tissue images with undersampling ratios up to 32, and extends to a hyperspectral mode capturing 128 spectral channels with undersampling ratios up to 64. Results confirm that compressive sensing allows significant reduction in acquisition rate for fluorescence imaging, while highlighting remaining challenges for practical deployment.

Abstract

The mathematical theory of compressed sensing (CS) asserts that one can acquire signals from measurements whose rate is much lower than the total bandwidth. Whereas the CS theory is now well developed, challenges concerning hardware implementations of CS-based acquisition devices—especially in optics—have only started being addressed. This paper presents an implementation of compressive sensing in fluorescence microscopy and its applications to biomedical imaging. Our CS microscope combines a dynamic structured wide-field illumination and a fast and sensitive single-point fluorescence detection to enable reconstructions of images of fluorescent beads, cells, and tissues with undersampling ratios (between the number of pixels and number of measurements) up to 32. We further demonstrate a hyperspectral mode and record images with 128 spectral channels and undersampling ratios up to 64, illustrating the potential benefits of CS acquisition for higher-dimensional signals, which typically exhibits extreme redundancy. Altogether, our results emphasize the interest of CS schemes for acquisition at a significantly reduced rate and point to some remaining challenges for CS fluorescence microscopy.