High dynamic range fluorescence imaging

Fluorescence acquisition and image display over a high dynamic range is highly desirable. However, the limited dynamic range of current photodetectors and imaging charge-coupled devices impose a limit on the fluorescence intensities that can be simultaneously captured during a single image acquisition. This is particularly troublesome when imaging biological samples, where protein expression fluctuates considerably. As a result, biological images will often contain regions with signal that is either saturated or hidden within background noise, causing information loss. In this paper, we summarize recent work from our group and others, to extended conventional to high dynamic range fluorescence imaging. These strategies have many biological applications, such as mapping of neural connections, vascular imaging, biodistribution studies or pharmacologic imaging at the single cell and organ level.