Schmid, B. et al. Nat. Commun. 4, 2207 (2013).

In multiview light-sheet microscopy, the use of several objectives enables one to image developing embryos over time and to obtain images from different views of the same region. But processing all these images offline requires massive storage and computing power. As an alternative, Schmid et al. develop a pipeline for processing and compressing images in real time, reducing the overall data that is stored. As a demonstration, they imaged zebrafish embryos that expressed GFP in endoderm cells using a multiview light-sheet microscopy setup. They approximated the shape of the embryo to a sphere and applied radial maximal intensity projections to produce two-dimensional images of the entire three-dimensional embryo. The resulting dataset requires gigabytes instead of terabytes for storage and enables visualization of cell migration patterns in entire embryos.