Method and apparatus for multiplexed imaging of spectrally-similar fluorophores

Abstract

Multiplexed fluorescent imaging which is essential for finding out how various biomolecules are spatially distributed in cells or tissues is disclosed. The present disclosure may obtain 10 or more different biomolecule images with one labeling and imaging by newly designing selection of fluorophores, detection spectral ranges, and signal unmixing algorithm. The present disclosure is a blind unmixing technology for unmixing an image without an emission spectrum of fluorophore, and in this technology, 4 pairs of fluorophores are used, and each pair consists of two fluorophores in which emission spectra are overlapped. Each pair of fluorophores is strongly excited by only one excitation laser. Two images with different detection spectral ranges are obtained for each pair, and two images are unmixed via mutual information minimization without fluorophore emission spectrum information. Two images also may be unmixed via Gram-Schmidt orthogonalization and fluorescence measurement based unmixing. This signal unmixing is repeated for each pair of fluorophores. Furthermore, a total of 10 or more fluorophores may be simultaneously used by adding two large stoke's shift fluorophores emitting light in wavelength ranges that does not overlap with the emission spectra of the above 8 fluorophores.