Optical Tomography by Confocal Fluorescence Microscope

Abstract

In the past few years, microscope tomography has been intensively studied.1-5 Agard and Sedat restored the 3-D structure of biological cells from the focus series images given by a conventional epi-fluorescence microscope, by inverting the 3-D optical transfer function of the system.1 However, since the 3-D OTF of an epi-fluorescence microscope is angularly band-limited,6 the 3-D spatial frequency components only within the angular band can be restored in their method. As a result, the longitudinal resolution in the restored 3-D structure is not at all satisfactory.