Structured illumination microscopy artifacts caused by illumination scattering

Despite its wide application in live-cell super-resolution (SR) imaging, structured illumination microscopy (SIM) suffers from aberrations caused by various sources. Although artifacts generated from inaccurate reconstruction parameter estimation and noise amplification can be minimized, aberrations due to the scattering of excitation light on samples have rarely been investigated. In this paper, by simulating multiple subcellular structure with the distinct refractive index (RI) from water, we study how different thicknesses of this subcellular structure scatter incident light on its optical path of SIM excitation. Because aberrant interference light aggravates with the increase in sample thickness, the reconstruction of the 2D-SIM SR image degraded with the change of focus along the axial axis. Therefore, this work may guide the future development of algorithms to suppress SIM artifacts caused by scattering in thick samples.