Robust 3 D Fluorescence Confocal Microscopy Deblurring

Our long term objective is the commercial availability of 3-D deblurring and noise reductionalgorithms for confocal fluorescence microscopy. This will have wide commercial acceptance by thebiology and health science fields, because confocal microscopy is the most predominant present-daylight microscopy modality for obtaining 3-D anatomical information in the structural biology, neuroscienceand other biological fields, yet it suffers from a substantial residual axial smearing and severe noise. Thisresearch will substantially improve the capability to optically visualize and measure 3-D anatomicalinformation. A major importance of doing so is that, in comparison to electron microscopy, confocalmicroscopy is much less expensive and it allows one to view live specimens. A blind deconvolutionalgorithm, which does not require the optical point spread function to be measured, will be used.Instead, it inherently produces a reconstruction of the point spread function. The specific objective ofthis project is to refine and test a present algorithm version to show the feasibility of: (1) correctingthese smearing and noise limitations routinely, robustly and with realistic computer power and (2), usingthis correction to improve cellular structure visualization and morphometric measurements.