Microscopes Improved With Artificial Intelligence

To observe the swift neuronal signals in a fish brain, scientists have started to use a technique called light-field microscopy, which makes it possible to image such fast biological processes in 3D. But the images are often lacking in quality, and it takes hours or days for massive amounts of data to be converted into 3D volumes and movies. Now, EMBL scientists have combined artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms with two cutting-edge microscopy techniques - an advance that shortens the time for image processing from days to mere seconds, while ensuring that the resulting images are crisp and accurate. The findings are published in Nature Methods. "Ultimately, we were able to take'the best of both worlds' in this approach," says Nils Wagner, one of the paper's two lead authors and now a PhD student at the Technical University of Munich.