Compressed sensing reconstruction of cell mechanical images obtained from atomic force microscopy

Compressed sensing (CS), a technique in signal processing that reconstructs sparse signals from a limited sampling number, has been valuable in topographic images obtained from atomic force microscopy (AFM). However, how CS is effective in reconstructing AFM mechanical images remains unclear. We investigated the reconstruction of topographic and mechanical images of living cells, such as developing embryos obtained from AFM mapping experiments using CS. The results showed that both topographic and mechanical images of embryonic cells in the different developmental stages were well reconstructed at a spatial resolution higher than the original AFM images. These results suggested that the CS approach enabled the cell mechanical properties, together with cell surface morphology, using AFM mapping measurements to be faster than the conventional AFM methods without reducing the spatial resolution.