What Is the Best Method to Fit Time-Resolved Data? A Comparison of the Residual Minimization and the Maximum Likelihood Techniques As Applied to Experimental Time-Correlated, Single-Photon Counting Data.

The need for measuring fluorescence lifetimes of species in subdiffraction-limited volumes in, for example, stimulated emission depletion (STED) microscopy, entails the dual challenge of probing a small number of fluorophores and fitting the concomitant sparse data set to the appropriate excited-state decay function. This need has stimulated a further investigation into the relative merits of two fitting techniques commonly referred to as “residual minimization” (RM) and “maximum likelihood” (ML). Fluorescence decays of the well-characterized standard, rose bengal in methanol at room temperature (530 ± 10 ps), were acquired in a set of five experiments in which the total number of “photon counts” was approximately 20, 200, 1000, 3000, and 6000 and there were about 2–200 counts at the maxima of the respective decays. Each set of experiments was repeated 50 times to generate the appropriate statistics. Each of the 250 data sets was analyzed by ML and two different RM methods (differing in the weighting of r...