WindSTORM: Robust online image processing for high-throughput nanoscopy

High-throughput nanoscopy becomes increasingly important for unraveling complex biological processes from a large heterogeneous cell population at a nanoscale resolution. High-density emitter localization combined with a large field of view and fast imaging frame rate is commonly used to achieve a high imaging throughput, but the image processing speed in the dense emitter scenario remains a bottleneck. Here we present a simple non-iterative approach, referred to as WindSTORM, to achieve high-speed high-density emitter localization with robust performance for various image characteristics. We demonstrate that WindSTORM improves the computation speed by two orders of magnitude on CPU and three orders of magnitude upon GPU acceleration to realize online image processing, without compromising localization accuracy. Further, due to the embedded background correction, WindSTORM is highly robust in the presence of high and non-uniform background. WindSTORM paves the way for next generation of high-throughput nanoscopy.