Enhanced super-resolution microscopy by extreme value based emitter recovery

Super-resolution localization microscopy allows visualization of biological structure at nanoscale resolution. However, the presence of heterogeneous background can degrade the nanoscale resolution by tens of nanometers and introduce significant image artifacts. Here we investigate and validate an efficient approach, referred to as extreme value-based emitter recovery (EVER), to accurately recover the distorted fluorescent emitters from heterogeneous background. Through numerical simulation and biological experiments, we validated the accuracy of EVER in improving the fidelity of the reconstructed super-resolution image for a wide variety of imaging characteristics. EVER requires no manual adjustment of parameters and has been implemented as an easy-to-use ImageJ plugin that can immediately enhance the quality of reconstructed super-resolution images. This method is validated as an efficient way for robust nanoscale imaging of samples with heterogeneous background fluorescence, such as thicker tissue and cells.