System and method for dense-stochastic-sampling imaging

摘要

The present invention is directed to an imaging system (902, 1706, 2002) and method for detecting relatively weak signals, over time. The system and method use the detected signals to determine the positions of signal emitters (602,604, 606). In certain embodiments imaging fluorophore-labelled samples are used and images thereof at resolutions significantly greater than the diffraction-limited resolution associated with optical microscopy are obtained. The invention employs overlapping-emitter-image disambiguation to allow data to be collected from densely arranged emitters, which significantly decreases the data-collection time for producing intermediate images (2102-2109) as well as the number of intermediate images needed to computationally construct high-resolution final images by summing the intermediate images. Additional embodiments of the present invention employ hierarchical image-processing techniques to further resolve and interpret disambiguated images.