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So You're Trying to Choose a Confocal Microscope

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2018

Ted Inoue*
Affiliation:
Video Microscopy, Inc.

Extract

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If you are one of the many people who are currently considering the purchase of a confocal microscope, you may be asking yourself, "How can 1 be sure that the microscope I choose is the right one?"

Before proceeding, take a step back. Ask yourself: "Why use a confocal?" A confocal microscope is, by definition, a microscope which optically "slices" the sample by showing only those details which are at or near the plane of focus. This results in a clearer image than might be possible with a conventional (also called "wide-field") fluorescence microscope - a microscope in which every pixel in every image is corrupted by light from its neighbors. The optical slicing of the sample done by the confocal microscope lets you construct a 3-D representation of the sample that can be very useful for image visualization or analysis.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Microscopy Society of America 1999

References

Handbook of Biological Confocal Microscopy, Pawley, J.B., editor, 2nd edition, Plenum Press, New York, 1995.Google Scholar
3-D Laser Sanning Confocal Microscopy Page - http://www.cs.ubc.ca/spider/ladic/confocal.html Google Scholar
Three-Dimensional Deconvolution of Optical Microscope Images Using Adaptive Inverse Modeling - http://panda.uchc.edu/htbit/home_pages/inverse_filter.html Google Scholar
Integrated Microscopy of Gene Transfer and Expression - http://www.bocklabs.wise.edu/imr/integrat/transg.htm Google Scholar
Introduction to Optics and Confocal Microscopy - http://lucifier.life.utsa.edu/CLSM/chpt2.html Google Scholar