Light sheet spectrometry

One interesting opportunity for light sheet microscopy is coupling it with a spectrometer. When the 'sheet' is created by scanning a line over the sample, it is possible to couple a grating in the perpendicular direction. Each position of the line will correspond to a different frame.

In this case, there is a clean formation of a hypercube, where the first two dimensions are space and spectrum, and the third dimension is the other spatial component.

It's a massive amount of data, effectively transforming an NxM array into an NxMxZ. It will add limitations in speed (but thats inherent to spectral spreading of light).

An alternative is to apply smart bandpass filters, similar to what Compressive Raman tries to achieve. In that case, it is possible to tune the system to optimize the information extraction by guiding only the most relevant pieces of the spectrum into the detector.