I4-1 Fluorescence Microscopy with the Help of Computational Spectacles

Computers are an invaluable tool for fluorescence microscopy. They assist in the entire process from data acquisition to parameter extraction from the acquired data. Some microscopy methods such as structured illumination, axial tomography or Pointillism would be unthinkable without the help of a computer. The notion is that the acquired data needs to contain the maximum information about your object but does not any longer need to be directly interpretable by a human observer. A prominent example of such a strategy in medical imaging would be magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), where the raw data is a series of spin-echo time traces. The computer helps to extract the information from the data and present it in a optimized way to the human observer. For fluorescence microscopy this will be exemplified with the relatively novel concepts of linear and non-linear structured illumination and Pointillism