Structured Illumination Microscopy

Abstract Structured illumination is a resolution-enhancement technique for widefield fluorescence microscopy that can double its spatial resolution in three dimensions by using spatially patterned excitation light. Such patterned excitation encodes conventionally unobservable high-resolution information in the form of low-resolution information, which is then computationally decoded to form a final image with extended resolution. In this chapter, we introduce the basic principles of structured illumination and describe in detail a number of key issues in its implementation as well the image reconstruction algorithms. We also discuss different forms of structured illumination and its extension, including its combination with interferometer and nonlinear structured illumination. We also present imaging results on quite a few different kinds of biological specimens.