Fast denoising and lossless spectrum extraction in stimulated Raman scattering microscopy.

Abstract

Stimulated Raman scattering (SRS) microscopy is a nonlinear optical imaging method for visualizing chemical content based on molecular vibrational bonds. However, the imaging speed and sensitivity are currently limited by the noise of the light beam probing the Raman process. In this paper, we present a fast non-average denoising and high-precision Raman shift extraction method, based on a self-reinforcing signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) enhancement algorithm, for SRS spectroscopy and microscopy. We compare the results of this method with the filtering methods and the reported experimental methods to demonstrate its high efficiency and high precision in spectral denoising, Raman peak extraction and image quality improvement. We demonstrate a maximum SNR enhancement of 10.3dB in fixed tissue imaging and 11.9dB in vivo imaging. This method reduces the cost and complexity of the SRS system and allows for high-quality SRS imaging without use of special laser, complicated system design and Raman tags.