Photon count estimation in single-molecule localization microscopy

Recently, Franke, Sauer and van de Linde1 introduced a way to estimate the axial position of single-molecules (TRABI). To this end, they compared the detected photon count from a temporal radial-aperture-based intensity estimation to the estimated count from Gaussian point-spread function (PSF) fitting to the data. Empirically they found this photometric ratio to be around 0.7-0.8 close to focus and decreasing away from it. Here, we explain this reported but unexplained discrepancy and furthermore show that the photometric ratio as indicator for axial position is susceptible even to typical optical aberrations.