Tiling light sheet selective plane illumination microscopy using discontinuous light sheets

Tiling light sheet selective plane illumination microscopy (TLS-SPIM) improves 3D imaging ability of SPIM by using a real-time optimized tiling light sheet. However, the imaging speed decreases, and size of the raw image data increases proportionally to the number of tiling positions in TLS-SPIM. The decreased imaging speed and the increased raw data size could cause significant problems when TLS-SPIM is used to image large specimens at high spatial resolution. Here, we present a novel method to solve the problem. Discontinuous light sheets created by scanning coaxial beam arrays synchronized with camera exposures are used for 3D imaging to decrease the number of tiling positions required at each image plane without sacrificing the spatial resolution. We investigate the performance of the method via numerical simulation and discuss the technical details of the method.