Deriving high contrast fluorescence microscopy images through low contrast noisy image stacks

Contrast in fluorescence microscopy images allows for the differentiation between different structures by their difference in intensities. However, factors such as point-spread function and noise may reduce it, affecting its interpretability. We identified that fluctuation of emitters in a stack of images can be exploited to achieve increased contrast when compared to the average and Richardson-Lucy deconvolution. We tested our methods on four increasingly challenging samples including tissue, in which case results were comparable to the ones obtained by structured illumination microscopy in terms of contrast. (c) 2021 Optical Society of America under the terms of the OSA Open Access Publishing Agreement

Automated summary

Contrast in fluorescence microscopy images can be increased by exploiting the fluctuation of emitters in a stack of images, yielding results comparable to structured illumination microscopy in tissue samples.