Though we’ve reached the diffraction limit of light in optical microscopes long ago, scientists are continuing to improve the images produced by them. Researchers National Institutes of Health and the University of Chicago just announced a new development that allows for much higher quality imaging of biological samples using light sheet microscopy, a common imaging technique.
The NIH team previously managed to figure out how to use three microscopes at the same time to inspect objects from different angles, combining data from each microscope into a high resolution 3D final product. But, trying to get another microscope into the setup became impossible due to space constraints, so the team instead used mirrored light sheets.
The problem the investigators ran into is that images coming from the mirrors were slightly disturbed by the bouncing light used to illuminate the sample. The researchers partnered with the University of Chicago scientists to develop algorithms that can clean up the image of these artifacts. The resulting images are nearly twice the resolution of similar, already used microscopes. Additionally, the new microscopic setup is faster, allowing for more samples to be quickly processed.
Study in Nature Communications: Reflective imaging improves spatiotemporal resolution and collection efficiency in light sheet microscopy…
Via: NIH…
