Specimens scatter and absorb light, thus, the delivery of the probing light and the collection of the signal light become inefficient; many endogenous biochemical compounds also absorb light and suffer degradation of some sort (photo-toxicity), which induces malfunction of a specimen. In conventional and confocal fluorescence microscopy, whenever a single plane is observed, the entire specimen is illuminated (Verveer 2007). Recording stacks of images along the optical z-axis thus illuminates the entire specimen once for each plane. Hence, cells are illuminated 10-20 and fi
