Correction In Microscopy Research Articles

Colour Vignetting Correction for Microscopy Image Mosaics Used for Quantitative Analyses.

Image mosaicing permits achieving one high-resolution image, extending the visible area of the sample while keeping the same resolution. However, intensity inhomogeneity of the stitched images can alter measurements and the right perception of the original sample. The problem can be solved by flat-field correcting the images through the vignetting function. Vignetting correction has been widely addressed for grey-level images, but not for colour ones. In this work, a practical solution for the colour vignetting correction in microscopy, also facing the problem of saturated pixels, is described. In order to assess the quality of the proposed approach, five different tonal correction approaches were quantitatively compared using state-of-the-art metrics and seven pairs of partially overlapping images of seven different samples. The results obtained proved that the proposed approach allows obtaining high quality colour flat-field corrected images and seamless mosaics without employing any blending adjustment. In order to give the opportunity to easily obtain seamless mosaics ready for quantitative analysis, the described vignetting correction method has been implemented in an upgraded release of MicroMos (version 3.0), an open-source software specifically designed to automatically obtain mosaics of partially overlapped images.

Pupil mask diversity for image correction in microscopy.

Three-dimensional microscopy suffers from sample-induced aberrations that reduce the resolution and lead to misinterpretations of the object distribution. In this paper, the resolution of a three-dimensional fluorescent microscope is significantly improved by introducing an amplitude diversity in the form of a binary amplitude mask positioned in several different orientations within the pupil, followed by computer processing of the diversity images. The method has proved to be fast, easy to implement, and cost-effective in high-resolution imaging of casper fli:GFP zebrafish.