Fast and accurate sCMOS noise correction for fluorescence microscopy

• Authors: Biagio Mandracchia, Georgia Institute of Technology; Xuanwen Hua, Georgia Institute of Technology; Changliang Guo, Georgia Institute of Technology; Jeonghwan Son, Georgia Institute of Technology; Tara Urner, Georgia Institute of Technology; Shu Jia, Emory University
• Journal Title: Nature Communications
• Volume: Volume 11, Number 1
• Publisher: Nature Research (part of Springer Nature): Fully open access journals | 2020-12-01, Pages 94-94
• Type of Work: Article | Final Publisher PDF
• Publisher DOI: http://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-13841-8
• Subjects: Engineering, Biomedical; Biophysics, General
• Keywords: Fluorescence imaging; Microscopy; biomedical engineering; electrons; physics

Abstract

The rapid development of scientific CMOS (sCMOS) technology has greatly advanced optical microscopy for biomedical research with superior sensitivity, resolution, field-of-view, and frame rates. However, for sCMOS sensors, the parallel charge-voltage conversion and different responsivity at each pixel induces extra readout and pattern noise compared to charge-coupled devices (CCD) and electron-multiplying CCD (EM-CCD) sensors. This can produce artifacts, deteriorate imaging capability, and hinder quantification of fluorescent signals, thereby compromising strategies to reduce photo-damage to live samples. Here, we propose a content-adaptive algorithm for the automatic correction of sCMOS-related noise (ACsN) for fluorescence microscopy. ACsN combines camera physics and layered sparse filtering to significantly reduce the most relevant noise sources in a sCMOS sensor while preserving the fine details of the signal. The method improves the camera performance, enabling fast, low-light and quantitative optical microscopy with video-rate denoising for a broad range of imaging conditions and modalities.