Labview

This implementation requires special software and hardware: LabVIEW from National Instruments—we used 2014 service pack 1—and a data acquisition card—we use the National Instruments PCI-6251 card on a PC with an Intel Core i5-4590 processor at 3.7GHz (a relatively low-end machine) with 24 gigabytes of RAM, running Microsoft Windows 8.1 Pro and Windows 10.
This implementation has several drawbacks: it requires expensive hardware and software from National Instruments (a data acquisition card and LabVIEW), Windows (we use hardware features of LabVIEW that are unavailable on MacOS or Linux), and due to the programming language it is difficult to modify and debug—indeed, a persistent bug in our implementation currently renders it substantially less accurate than the other detector implementations on some syllables. However, our test configuration proved itself capable of excellent performance, and further gains should be possible if the implementation were retargeted onto field-programmable gate array (FPGA) hardware—which would have the additional benefit of providing deterministic “hard realtime” guarantees—or just run on a faster desktop system.

The control waveforms for implementing single- and dual-color 0.8/0.8 NA reflective diSPIM imaging are similar to those in our previous triple-view light-sheet imaging^{1 (link)}, except that excitation was usually introduced from one objective (i.e., we did not use alternating excitation, except for the comparative 0.8 NA/0.8 NA dual-view images and 1.1 NA/0.71 NA quadruple-view images shown in Fig. 4d). The waveforms include a step-wise waveform (e.g., 200 Hz/plane, 250 ms volume imaging rate for 50 planes) to drive the XY piezo stage, and two identical external trigger signals to simultaneously trigger the two sCMOS cameras. Programs controlling DAQ waveforms were written in Labview (National Instruments) and programs controlling image acquisition (via PCO sCMOS cameras) were written in the Python programming language.
The control waveforms for implementing single-color 1.1/0.71 NA reflective diSPIM imaging are similar to those used in our fiber-coupled diSPIM^{14 (link)}, and include a step-wise waveform to drive the XY piezo stage and two external trigger signals to sequentially trigger the two sCMOS cameras. Programs controlling DAQ waveforms and Hamamatsu sCMOS image acquisition were both written in Labview (National Instruments). All software programs are available upon request. Supplementary Table 3 summarizes data acquisition parameters used in this work.