Depth-variant deconvolution of 3D widefield fluorescence microscopy using the penalized maximum likelihood estimation method.

We investigated the deconvolution of 3D widefield fluorescence microscopy using the penalized maximum likelihood estimation method and the depth-variant point spread function (DV-PSF). We build the DV-PSF by fitting a parameterized theoretical PSF model to an experimental microbead image. On the basis of the constructed DV-PSF, we restore the 3D widefield microscopy by minimizing an objective function consisting of a negative Poisson likelihood function and a total variation regularization function. In simulations and experiments, the proposed method showed better performance than existing methods.