Section: Overall Objectives

Scientific context and motivations

During the past two decades, biological imaging has undergone a revolution in the development of new microscopy techniques that allow visualization of tissues, cells, proteins and macromolecular structures at all levels of resolution, physiological states, chemical composition and dynamics. Thanks to recent advances in optics, digital sensors and labeling probes (e.g., Colored Fluorescence Protein), one can now visualize sub-cellular components and organelles at the scale of several hundreds of nanometers to a few dozens nanometers. As a result, fluorescent microscopy and multimodal imaging (fluorophores at various wavelengths) have become the workhorse of modern biology. All the technological advances in microscopy have created new issues and challenges for researchers in quantitative image processing and analysis. Since the digital processing is now part of the imaging loop, image processing may even drive imaging. A brilliant example of this shift in paradigm is super-resolution localization microscopy (PALM, STED), which was awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.