Fast frame scanning camera system for light-sheet microscopy

In the interest of improving the temporal resolution for light-sheet microscopy, we designed a fast frame scanning camera system that incorporated a galvanometer scanning mirror into the imaging path of a home-built light-sheet microscope. This system transformed a temporal image sequence to a spatial one so that multiple images could be acquired during one exposure period. The improvement factor of the frame rate was dependent on the number of sub-images that could be tiled on the sensor without overlapping each other and was therefore a trade-off with the image size. As a demonstration, we achieved 960 frames/s (fps) on a CCD camera that was originally capable of recording images at only 30 fps (full frame). This allowed us to observe millisecond or sub-millisecond events with ordinary CCD cameras.