Munich, Germany, April 2001

The Deconvolution module - a powerful method for resolution enhancement of fluorescence images

TILL Photonics GmbH proudly announced a new solution to remove out-of-focus blurring from fluorescence images.

The TILL Deconvolution module, an extension of the imaging software TILLvisION, is used to easily remove blurring from out-of-focus and convolutional effects. A three dimensional FIR (finite impulse response) filter is used to adaptively inverse model the point spread function (PSF) that characterizes the corruption. A submicron sized bead, a pseudo point light source and optical impulse function, is imaged as a z stack and used in an adaptive inverse modeling configuration with the desired signal (an exponential that decreases rapidly) taken as an approximation to an impulse. The resulting filter is then applied to the data acquired with the microscope. The results are superior to the spatial frequency techniques that introduce distortion due to frequency domain artifacts.

Filter calculation has to be done once for every optical set-up (wavelength, objective, z step size, binning) and is achieved with a modern PC within hours. Deconvolution of image stacks takes only a few minutes. The result are excellent images with a quality close to that acquired with confocal microscopes. TILL Deconvolution, however, combines high spatial resolution with the superior speed of the unique monochromator-based 3D time-lapse imaging system of TILL Photonics.