Fluorescence imaging technique created

Microscopy experts have designed and built a fluorescence-detection microscope that combines 3-D and high resolution image processing, and may have potential uses for biomedical research.

This new technique enables deep-tissue imaging in three dimensions with a better depth of field than comparable techniques. Post-processing of images is also possible, enabling artifacts, or errors, to be removed. The microscope illuminates multiple points, before combining the signals of light modulation patterns to create a 3-D image.

Jeffrey Fields, director of Colorado State University’s (CSU) microscope imaging network, said: “The idea is that you have a fluorophore at any point in the specimen, and the temporal structure of its fluorescence will be distinguishable from all others. So you can have this huge array of fluorophores, and just with this single-pixel detector, you can tell where every one of them is in that 2D field.”

Named CHIRPT (Coherent Holographic Image Reconstruction by Phase Transfer), it could allow biomedical researchers to produce sharp, three-dimensional images of cells or tissues at levels unattainable with current fluorescence microscopy. This could potentially lead to imaging multicellular processes in real time – currently light microscopes can only view one cell at a time.

This new technology allows CSU researchers to take 600 frames per second, a huge leap on current technology. Field’s work, along with Randy Bartels and David Winters, CSU researchers, has been published in Optica.