Jb. De Monvel et al., Image restoration for confocal microscopy: Improving the limits of deconvolution, with application to the visualization of the mammalian hearing organ, BIOPHYS J, 80(5), 2001, pp. 2455-2470
Deconvolution algorithms have proven very effective in conventional (wide-f
ield) fluorescence microscopy. Their application to confocal microscopy is
hampered, in biological experiments, by the presence of important levels of
noise in the images and by the lack of a precise knowledge of the point sp
read function (PSF) of the system. We investigate the application of wavele
t-based processing tools to deal with these problems, in particular wavelet
denoising methods, which turn out to be very effective in application to t
hree-dimensional confocal images. When used in combination with more classi
cal deconvolution algorithms, these methods provide a robust and efficient
restoration scheme allowing one to deal with difficult imaging conditions.
To make our approach applicable in practical situations, we measured the PS
F of a Biorad-MRC1024 confocal microscope under a large set of imaging cond
itions, including in situ acquisitions. As a specific biological applicatio
n, we present several examples of restorations of three-dimensional confoca
l images acquired inside an intact preparation of the hearing organ. We als
o provide a quantitative assessment of the gain in quality achieved by wave
let-aided restorations over classical deconvolution schemes, based on a set
of numerical experiments that we performed with test images.