Information limits of optical microscopy: application to fluorescently labelled tissue section

TL;DR

This paper explores the fundamental information limits of optical microscopy, using a novel entropy-based method to achieve localization precision comparable to electron microscopy in fluorescently labeled tissue sections.

Contribution

It introduces a new information-entropic variable, point divergence gain, for highly localized 3D structure reconstruction in diffractive microscopy.

Findings

Achieves localization precision comparable to electron microscopy.

Demonstrates the use of point divergence gain in fluorescence microscopy.

Provides insights into the smallest localized information in optical imaging.

Abstract

The article demonstrates some less known principles of image build-up in diffractive microscopy and their usage in analysis unravelling the smallest localized information about the original object - an electromagnetic centroid. In fluorescence, the electromagnetic centroid is naturally at the position of the fluorophore. The usage of an information-entropic variable - a point divergence gain - is demonstrated for finding the most localized position of the object's representation, generally of the size of a voxel (3D pixel). These spatial pixels can be qualitatively classified and used for reconstruction of the 3D structures with precision comparable with electron microscopy.