Estimation of multiexponential fluorescence decay parameters using compressive sensing

Fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy (FLIM) is a microscopic imaging technique to present an image of fluorophore lifetimes. It circumvents the problems of typical imaging methods such as intensity attenuation from depth since a lifetime is independent of the excitation intensity or fluorophore concentration. The lifetime is estimated from the time sequence of photon counts observed with signal-dependent noise, which has a Poisson distribution. Conventional methods usually estimate single or biexponential decay parameters. However, a lifetime component has a distribution or width, because the lifetime depends on macromolecular conformation or inhomogeneity. We present a novel algorithm based on a sparse representation which can estimate the distribution of lifetime. We verify the enhanced performance through simulations and experiments.