Prof. Tony Wilson, University of Oxford (Emeritus), Past President of the Royal Microscopy Society and past Editor of the Journal of Microscopy, will be presenting the lecture "Confocal Microscopy Today".
All are welcome Monday, December 9th at 1 pm in the SRNML conference room.
Prof. Wilson was a key developer of the laser confocal scanning microscope and structured illumination microscopy. We hope to see you there to welcome one of the great pioneers of confocal microscopy!
Abstract
The most important property of the confocal microscope is probably its ability to record high resolution, high contrast, thin, in focus optical slices from within a thick specimen. In many cases, the increase in contrast is the important point. In other cases a through-focus series of such optical sections permit the specimen to be rendered din three dimensions. The original designs of such instruments used the point source – point detector optical system proposed by Marvin Minsky in the 1950s. This system provides the necessary optical sectioning but, in order to form an image, it is necessary both to introduce scanning and, because of the need to use point illumination and point detection, a bright light source such as a laser must be used. This was the only practical approach when confocal microscopy first came to prominence in the 1970s. The early systems, and many commercial implementations, were built around conventional microscopes. However, since these early days technological advances in areas such as high-quality CCD cameras, non laser light sources and inexpensive optical image processing has permitted alternative, 21st century, approaches to obtain optical sectioning to be developed. We will describe one such approach which uses a combination of structured illumination and structured detection to allow optical sectioning to be achieved at high speed without the need for laser illumination. We will show examples where the approach can either be combined with a conventional optical microscope or built as a stand-alone system
