Enhanced reconstruction of structured illumination microscopy on a polarized specimen

Structured illumination microscopy (SIM) requires polarization control to guarantee the high-contrast illumination pattern. However, this modulated polarization will induce artifacts in SIM when imaging fluorescent dipoles. Here we proposed the polarization weighted recombination of frequency components to reconstruct SIM data with suppressed artifacts and better resolving power. Both the simulation results and experimental data demonstrate that our algorithm can obtain isotropic resolution on dipoles and resolve a clearer structure in high-density sections compared to the conventional algorithm. Our work reinforces the SIM theory and paves the avenue for the application of SIM on a polarized specimen. (C) 2020 Optical Society of America under the terms of the OSA Open Access Publishing Agreement