Biobeam - Rigorous wave-optical simulations of light-sheet microscopy

Sample-induced image-degradation remains an intricate wave-optical problem in light-sheet microscopy. Here we present biobeam, an open-source software package that enables to simulate operational light-sheet microscopes by combining data from 10^5 - 10^6 multiplexed and GPU-accelerated point-spread-function calculations. The wave-optical nature of these simulations leads to the faithful reproduction of spatially varying aberrations, diffraction artifacts, geometric image distortions, adaptive optics, and emergent wave optical phenomena, and renders image-formation in light-sheet microscopy computationally tractable.