Fluorescence Confocal Microscopy Imaging denoising with photobleaching

The Fluorescence Confocal Microscopy (FCM) is nowadays one of the most important tools in biomedical and pharmaceutic research. The main advantage of this technique over the traditional bright field optical microscopy is the fact that it allows the selection of a thin cross-section of the sample by rejecting the visual information coming from the out-of-focus planes. However, the small amount of energy radiated by the fluorophore and the huge light amplification performed by the photon detector to capture this visual information introduces a type of multiplicative noise described by a Poisson distribution. Additionally, the radiation efficiency of the fluorophore decreases with the time, an effect called photobleaching, leading to a decrease in the image intensity along the time.