High-speed and 3D fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy with computational optics

Fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy (FLIM) is a powerful imaging tool that provides molecular-specific information about samples through the measurement of fluorescence decay time. However, to acquire lifetime images, conventional FLIM requires extensive scanning in both the spatial and temporal domain, resulting in a slow acquisition rate. To address this challenge, we developed a computational imaging method called light field tomographic FLIM (LIFT-FLIM). With the compressed sensing principle, our LIFT-FLIM acquires 3D volumetric fluorescence lifetime images in a highly efficient manner, significantly reducing the number of scanning steps. We tested LIFT-FLIM on various biosamples.