Li, Yahui; Tian, Jinshou; Li, David Day-Uei

A single-shot fluorescence lifetime imaging (FLIM) method based on the compressed ultrafast photography (CUP) is proposed, named space-restricted CUP (srCUP). srCUP is suitable for imaging objects moving slowly in the field of view with the intensity changing within nanoseconds in a measurement window around 10 ns. We used synthetic datasets to explore the performances of srCUP compared with CUP and TCUP (a variant of CUP). srCUP not only provides superior reconstruction performances, but its reconstruction speed is also twofold and threefold faster than CUP and TCUP, respectively. The lifetime determination performances were assessed by estimating lifetime components, amplitude- and intensity-weighted average lifetimes (tau(A) and tau(I)), with the reconstructed scenes using the least squares method based on a bi-exponential model. srCUP has the best accuracy and precision for lifetime determinations with a relative bias less than 7% and a coefficient of variation less than 7% for tau(A), and a relative bias less than 10% and a coefficient of variation less than 11% for tau(I).

The result was published on APPLIED OPTICS.  DOI: 10.1364/AO.415594