System- and sample-agnostic isotropic three-dimensional microscopy by weakly physics-informed, domain-shift-resistant axial deblurring

Abstract Three-dimensional subcellular imaging is essential for biomedical research, but the diffraction limit of optical microscopy compromises axial resolution, hindering accurate three-dimensional structural analysis. This challenge is particularly pronounced in label-free imaging of thick, heter...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Jiashu Han, Kunzan Liu, Keith B. Isaacson, Kristina Monakhova, Linda G. Griffith, Sixian You
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Nature Portfolio 2025-01-01
Series:Nature Communications
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-56078-4
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Summary:Abstract Three-dimensional subcellular imaging is essential for biomedical research, but the diffraction limit of optical microscopy compromises axial resolution, hindering accurate three-dimensional structural analysis. This challenge is particularly pronounced in label-free imaging of thick, heterogeneous tissues, where assumptions about data distribution (e.g. sparsity, label-specific distribution, and lateral-axial similarity) and system priors (e.g. independent and identically distributed noise and linear shift-invariant point-spread functions are often invalid. Here, we introduce SSAI-3D, a weakly physics-informed, domain-shift-resistant framework for robust isotropic three-dimensional imaging. SSAI-3D enables robust axial deblurring by generating a diverse, noise-resilient, sample-informed training dataset and sparsely fine-tuning a large pre-trained blind deblurring network. SSAI-3D is applied to label-free nonlinear imaging of living organoids, freshly excised human endometrium tissue, and mouse whisker pads, and further validated in publicly available ground-truth-paired experimental datasets of three-dimensional heterogeneous biological tissues with unknown blurring and noise across different microscopy systems.
ISSN:2041-1723