Technology ID
TAB-4572

Resolution Doubling with Digital Confocal Microscopy

E-Numbers
E-005-2012-0
Lead Inventor
Parekh, Sapun (National Science Foundation)
Co-Inventors
Shroff, Hari (NIBIB)
York, Andrew
Combs, Christian (NHLBI)
Applications
Research Materials
Development Stages
Pre-Clinical (in vitro)
Research Products
Research Equipment
Lead IC
NIBIB
ICs
NIBIB
NHLBI

This technology includes a microscopy method that reduces the speed penalty at least 1000-fold, while retaining resolution improvement. A Digital mirror device (DMD) or sweptfield confocal unit is used to create hundreds to thousands of excitation foci that are imaged to a sample mounted in a conventional microscope and record the resulting emissions on an array detector. Detection of each confocal spot is done in our proprietary software, as is the processing and deconvolution that is used for a 2x resolution enhancement. Our method provides some optical sectioning, as we can implement a variable pinhole for each confocal spot in software - thus offering advantages over existing 2D resolution-doubling structured illumination approaches that are commercially available. Furthermore, as the pinholes are 'digital' there is no loss in light due to the extra optics and pinholes contained in commercial sweptfield confocal microscopes.

Commercial Applications
Improvement of currently available confocal microscopes.

Competitive Advantages
While several commercial structured illumination (SI) microscopes exist, they are expensive and are limited in depth to samples less than ~10 microns. The advantage of our system is that it can be implemented on existing hardware, and/or can be constructed with many fewer components, as much of the hardware burden of other SI approaches is 'off-loaded' onto software.

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Licensing Contact:
Luna, Lunet
lunet.luna@nih.gov

Publications

Collaborations

  • Licensing

Collaboration Description

  • We are seeking statements of capability or interest from parties interested in collaborative research to further develop, evaluate, or commercialize this technology.
Date Published