Let
be the standard deviation of a fitted
Gaussian PSF in
,
is the backprojected pixel size
in
,
is estimate of the number of
photons detected for a given molecule, and
is the background
signal level in photons calculated as the standard deviation of the
residuals between the raw data and the fitted PSF model. The uncertainty
of least-squares or maximum-likelihood estimate of lateral position
of a molecule is estimated as
![]() |
(1) |
respectively. Here
![]() |
The uncertainty for least-squares estimate is also known as the Thompson-Larson-Webb
formula [4], which has been altered with the correction
factor of
as suggested by [1].
The uncertainty for maximum-likelihood was derived in [3].
Finally, the compensation for readout noise
and EM gain
has been added by following [2], who suggested that when
using EMCCD cameras, the correction factors should be set to
,
and when using CCD or sCMOS cameras the readout noise in electron
counts should be set to
.
The lateral uncertainty is calculated same as in the 1,
but
differs because of the axial defocus (PSF spreads and
is never focused in both planes simultaneously, thus the uncertainty
is worse). This has been derived in [3] as
![]() |
Since the axial position is estimated from
and
, the axial uncertainty is calculated
from uncertainty of these parameters
![]() |
(2) |
where
can be substituted to calculate uncertainty of
and
. Then from error propagation follows
![]() |
(3) | ||
![]() |
(4) | ||
![]() |
(5) |
where
is the distance between focal planes given by the astigmatic
lens and the geometry of the setup and
is a measure of focal
depth. These quantities are already known during the 3D fitting process
as
and
, where
are parameters of the defocus curves.