Fluorescence microscopy with a coded aperture snapshot spectral imager

This paper describes the application of a coded aperture snapshot spectral imager (CASSI) to fluorescence microscopy. CASSI records an interleaved spatially varying, spectrally filtered map of an object on a 2D focal plane. Convex optimization techniques combining least squares QR factorization with a total variance constraint are used to reconstruct a 3D data cube from a spectrally encoded 2D scene. CASSI records a 3D dataset at video rate - making it suitable for dynamic cellular imaging. We report on the reconstruction of fluorescent microspheres used in fluorescence microscopy applications and compare the results with images from a multi-spectral confocal system.