Recent advances in Performance Enhancement Technologies for Structured Illumination Microscopy: A Comprehensive Review

• Structured Illumination Microscopy (SIM) bypasses diffraction limits via high-frequency information shifting. • SIM enables live-cell imaging with low phototoxicity and broad dye compatibility. • Wide-field SIM achieves 2 × lateral and 3 × axial resolution enhancement. • Recent point-scanning SIM innovations improve volumetric imaging speed and depth. • Multicolor and 3D-SIM variants address dynamic biological process visualization needs. • Future directions include computational fusion and multimodal super-resolution integration. Structured Illumination Microscopy (SIM) surpasses the diffraction limit by utilizing structured illumination to shift high-frequency information of the sample into the passband of the optical system, enabling super-resolution imaging. With its advantages of low excitation intensity, compatibility with a wide range of fluorescent dyes, and rapid wide-field imaging capabilities, SIM has become a widely adopted technique for super-resolution imaging of living cells. In this review, the working principles, reconstruction methods, and typical experimental setup of conventional SIM are introduced. Recognizing the breadth of the SIM field and its rapid evolution across optics, hardware, and algorithms, the review emphasizes recent advances in optical technologies and hardware innovations, while algorithmic developments, though crucial, receive less detailed coverage. Then, the advancements of wide-field SIM in resolution enhancement, multicolor imaging, and axial resolution improvement are explored. Next, we present the latest development of point-scanning SIM. Finally, the characteristics of different types of SIM are summarized, along with an outlook on future challenges and trends of development in leveraging SIM for various imaging applications.