Estimation of microscope drift using fluorescent nanodiamonds as fiducial markers

Abstract

Fiducial markers are used to correct the microscope drift and should be photostable, be usable at multiple wavelengths and be compatible for multimodal imaging. Fiducial markers such as beads, gold nanoparticles, microfabricated patterns and organic fluorophores lack one or more of these criteria. Moreover, the localization accuracy and drift correction can be degraded by other fluorophores, instrument noise and artefacts due to image processing and tracking algorithms. Estimating mechanical drift by assuming Gaussian distributed noise is not suitable under these circumstances. Here we present a method that uses fluorescent nanodiamonds as fiducial markers and uses an improved maximum likelihood algorithm to estimate the drift with both accuracy and precision within the range 1.55-5.75 nm.