Stimulated emission depletion microscopy with array detection and photon reassignment

ISM can effectively enhance the signal strength and spatial resolution of traditional confocal microscopy. How ever, its maximum resolution is limited to root 2 times higher than confocal. On the other hand, stimulated emission depletion (STED) microscopy has been proven to be able to greatly improve the spatial resolution of confocal and has been widely used in practical applications. In this article, we present the implementation of STED with array detection and photon reassignment, and for convenient engineering applications, we also implement an integrated and practical array detection and photon reassignment module. We give a brief explanation of theoretical basis of array detection and photon reassignment, and make a comparison of these two methods. In practical applications, we tested the imaging characteristics of the system with a variety of samples. The results show that array detection can effectively improve the imaging signal-to-noise ratio (SNR); meanwhile, photon reassignment can also improve SNR and resolution to some extent under different depletion intensity. We believe that our research will provide effective inspiration and reference for subsequent research and can be widely applied to actual imaging observations.