Fig. 1: General principle and validation of SparseFLIM.
From: Overcoming photon and spatiotemporal sparsity in fluorescence lifetime imaging with SparseFLIM
a FLIM setup and data acquisition. b Photon distribution in the \({{{\boldsymbol{x}}}}\)-\({{{\boldsymbol{y}}}}\) plane. c Comparison of photon counts between sparse and sufficient acquisition modes. d 2D mean lifetime (\({{{{\boldsymbol{\tau }}}}}_{{{{\boldsymbol{m}}}}}\)) images (left) and 3D lifetime stacks (right). e Network architecture of SparseFLIM. \({{{{\boldsymbol{t}}}}}_{{{{\boldsymbol{i}}}}}\) indicates the ith-frame time. \({{{{\boldsymbol{F}}}}}_{{{{\boldsymbol{f}}}}}\), forward propagation branch; \({{{{\boldsymbol{F}}}}}_{{{{\boldsymbol{b}}}}}\), backward propagation branch. \({{{\boldsymbol{A}}}}\), aggregation blocks. \({{{{\boldsymbol{F}}}}}_{{{{\boldsymbol{f}}}}}\) and \({{{{\boldsymbol{F}}}}}_{{{{\boldsymbol{b}}}}}\) are coupled indicated by the cyan arrow line. f Information refilling module. FE feature extractor; Conv convolution operations; Res residual blocks. g Comparison of the sparse photon input, network output, and sufficient photon reference. h Autofluorescence decay of the location indicated by the cross in g for the sparse photon acquisition. i Data restored from the sparse photon recording using our network, which is consistent with the autofluorescence decay of the sufficient photon recording. The bottom panels correspond to the fitting residuals. Also, see Supplementary Movie 1. Scale bar, 100 μm.
