Parallelized Light-sheet Microscopy with Flexible and Encoded Illumination

Light Sheet Microscopy (LSM), being capable of optical sectioning at diffraction-limited resolution and at low light doses [1], has become the tool of choice for volumetric imaging of large samples. Unfortunately, traditional LSM architectures are limited in speed because a z-stack is collected by either sample translation or synchronized movement of objective lens and light-sheet. A promising solution to avoid slow mechanical movements is extending the Depth-of-Field (DoF) of the microscope [2], [3] and moving only the light-sheet. However, the DoF extension comes at the cost of a loss of photons, compromising the signal-to-noise ratio of the images. Here, we propose an innovative technique devoted to restoring the signal content of the images, while preserving the speed of extended DoF microscopes.