Imaging

When screening for phenotypes there are many methods that are used. Usin’Life uses artificial intelligence methods to analyze the image data sets but there have other laboratories that use other interesting methods. Dr Lu’s lab published a paper in Nature methods (Nat. Methods 9, 977–980, 2012) that uses microfluidic technology to determine the phenotypic characteristics…

David Brady of Duke University published a paper in Nature in 2012 (Brady DJ, Nature 486, 386) on 50 Gigapixel camera. The technology was interesting in that it used small camera’s that were coupled through a big lens. This may be a good strategy to make large cameras rather than depend on major lenses and…

Bessel beams are beam of laser light that are non-refracting and shaped liked the figure shown. The interesting characteristics about them are couple: 1.They do not diffract. Most light beams diffract and therefore do not make very good targets. 2.Their energy is spread over a larger area and therefore make great beams to work with…

In cell imaging, the most often used proteins are the Fluorescent proteins like (Green Fluorescent Protein}, GFP or many other fluorescent proteins like Yellow-FP, Blue-FP. They are popular because it is possible to express a labeled protein directly inside the cell. Before the discovery of fluorescent proteins, the only method was to express the protein,…

Bayes methods have come to microscopy. Researchers have developed the Bayesian analysis of photo-blinking and photo-bleaching in microscopy to deduce the structure that is not usually visible. (Bayesian localization microscopy reveals nanoscale podosome dynamics, Cox, S et al, Nat. Methods 9, 195 (2012)) http://www.nature.com/nmeth/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nmeth.1812.html There have been many methods that are used for super resolution…

Cloud computing is a very useful if you are processing large amount of data and cannot wait for your results or these are clinical and mission critical operations. However, there are several steps you need to understand before using it for imaging. The factors that affect most calculations for cost and use are: RAM: Random…

Andreas Velten at MIT has been working in the lab of Ramesh Raskar to develop a camera that captures almost at the speed of light. This work was inspired by the bullet through the apple pictures by Doc Edgerton also at MIT. Their work is fascinating to see on Andreas website but it is hard…

In the field of imaging there is another branch of image acquisition/analysis/study that is called Computational Photography as distinguished from traditional photography. In traditional photography, with a regular camera, you take a picture of a 3D scene through a camera. This light from the scene is captured as a 2-dimensional representation onto a photo-sensitive surface,…