Researchers have created a new imaging method that uses fewer images than conventional nanoscopy methods to generate nm-scale resolution. The researchers used ghost imaging to accelerate their method’s imaging performance. The novel method might be advantageous for live cell imaging.
The approach is founded on stochastic optical reconstruction microscopy (STORM), a wide-field microscopy technique that makes use of fluorescent labels that alternate between dark (off) and light-emitting (on) states. The user can use STORM to pinpoint the position of each molecule and then use this information to reconstruct a fluorescence picture by taking hundreds or even thousands of images, each of which captures the subset of fluorescent labels that are “on” at a specific moment.
The researchers used ghost imaging, a method that creates a picture of an object by comparing a light pattern that reacts with the object with a reference pattern that does not, to speed up the STORM imaging process. The researchers also employed compressive imaging, a computational strategy that employs an algorithm to fill in the blanks, allowing picture reconstruction with fewer exposures.
Using a random phase modulator, the scientists transformed the object’s luminescence into a random speckle pattern. By coding the fluorescence in this manner, a very quick CMOS camera could capture the light intensity from the complete object in a single frame.
To form the image via ghost imaging and compressive imaging, the light intensity was correlated with a reference light pattern in a single-step process.
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