Estimating the point-spread-function using 1 µm diameter microspheres for image restoration in biomedical multiphoton microscopy

Abstract

Multiphoton microscopy (MPM) is an advanced imaging technique used in biological and biomedical research to visualize and study living tissues and cells with high resolution. It is particularly well-suited for deep tissue imaging, as it minimizes photodamage and provides improved penetration compared to traditional microscopy techniques like confocal microscopy. The Point Spread Function (PSF) plays a crucial role in multiphoton microscopy and describes how a point source of light is imaged as a spatial distribution in the microscope. Understanding the 3D PSF is essential for deconvolution and other post-processing techniques used to reconstruct 3D images from a stack of 2D images. The imaging of fluorescent beads used as point sources is a solution to evaluate the PSF. Usually, this strategy involves a bead of dimensions smaller than resolutions, typically with diameter of about less than 200 nm. However, in this setting, it is often complex to detect correctly the beads and thus to estimate accurately the PSF. We develop a computational solution for the PSF estimation based on the imaging of micro objects bigger than the resolution limit. We use fluorescent microspheres with a diameter of 1 µm and estimate the PSF from the deformations observed in the image of these microspheres. A deconvolution strategy illustrates the performance of our method, where we successfully restore an unsliced whole striated skeletal muscle utilizing the PSF estimated with 1 µm diameter beads.