Single-sample image-fusion upsampling of fluorescence lifetime images | Science Advances

Fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy (FLIM) provides detailed information about molecular interactions and biological processes. A major bottleneck for FLIM is image resolution at high acquisition speeds due to the engineering and signal-processing limitations of time-resolved imaging technology. Here, we present single-sample image-fusion upsampling, a data-fusion approach to computational FLIM super-resolution that combines measurements from a low-resolution time-resolved detector (that measures photon arrival time) and a high-resolution camera (that measures intensity only). To solve this otherwise ill-posed inverse retrieval problem, we introduce statistically informed priors that encode local and global correlations between the two “single-sample” measurements. This bypasses the risk of out-of-distribution hallucination as in traditional data-driven approaches and delivers enhanced images compared, for example, to standard bilinear interpolation. The general approach laid out by single-sample image-fusion upsampling can be applied to other image super-resolution problems where two different datasets are available.