Stripe artifact reduction for digital scanned structured illumination light sheet microscopy

Light sheet microscopy is an important and widely used method for studying large and semi-opaque biological specimens. One drawback of the approach is that it often results in stripe artifacts due to absorption and scattering in the illumination path. Here we describe a new approach which will effectively mitigate the artifacts in digital scanned light sheet microscopy (DSLM) and digital scanned structured illumination light sheet microscopy (DSLM-SI). We further improve the results of DSLM-SI through a new reconstruction method which achieves clearer reconstructed images. We demonstrate the reduction of stripe artifacts by imaging 156 microns deep into the larval zebrafish central nervous system. The magnitude of stripe artifacts is reduced by an average of 20% across three datasets. (C) 2019 Optical Society of America