Bergermann, F. et al. Opt. Express 23, 211–223 (2015).

Imaging large fields of view using stimulated emission depletion (STED) microscopy with single-point scanning requires long imaging times, which limits the utility of this approach for studying rapid biological processes. Recent efforts have sought to increase the speed of STED imaging through massively parallelized acquisition. Bergermann et al. expanded on an existing approach to achieve 2,000-fold parallelization of STED in two colors. In this approach, wide-field excitation is combined with patterned off-switching to generate the confined fluorescence that is the hallmark of STED. Compared to previous attempts for massively parallelized STED, this approach was able to achieve the same resolution as single-point scanning STED while imaging a 30-fold-larger field of view. These breakthroughs now make camera frame rates the limiting factor in acquisition speed and pave the way for imaging at high spatiotemporal resolution.