User manual LEICA LAS POWER MOSAIC BROCHURE

[. . . ] The captured images are immediately combined to form a seamless mosaic image. Once the scan is complete you can relocate effortlessly to areas of interest with a single mouse click and can view the live microscope image that corresponds to a chosen location. Additionally you can zoom and pan around the entire digitised mosaic image using easy and intuitive "browsing" tools. [. . . ] Finally you can optionally, employ a number of different automatic focussing techniques as appropriate for the scanning method and the nature of the specimen. Once the scan area has been defined the system automatically calculates the number of images that need to be acquired to form a complete full resolution mosaic of the chosen area. The exact nature of the scan performed is fully controllable and depends on the microscopy method employed (eg : brightfield or fluorescence) and the format of mosaic required. Everything else is handled automatically by the system, using previously defined values to determine speed, focussing method and data format. When the scan is complete, you may revisit points of interest with a single mouse click or copy all or part of the mosaic for distribution, publication or discussion with colleagues. Additionally, since the entire area scanned is now available in digital form and at full resolution, the image data is available for annotation or further analysis within applications active in the Leica Application Suite. LAS Power Mosaic requires a Leica motorised microscope, Leica Digital Camera, motorised stepper stage, motorized focus with XY control board, a high performance Windows PC and a very large hard drive. Time and Space! The time needed to perform a scan depends on a number of different factors, such as the objective lens used, the illumination method and the area to be scanned. As a general rule, brightfield scanning of histological sections can be done at the highest speeds whereas scanning in fluorescence or for specimens with difficult focal characteristics (as are typical in cytology) must be performed at lower speeds. Some examples of the overall time needed for different types of scan using predictive focus are shown in the table below. LAS Power Mosaic saves all captured digital images to the PC hard drive. Each individual full resolution image captured from a Leica DFC300 FX digital camera will require approximately 4. 5 Megabytes of storage space. Since a typical scan may comprise of many hundreds, or even thousands, of individual images the storage required can quickly become several Gigabytes. As a general rule the amount of image data that will result from a scan will increase fourfold for each doubling of objective magnification. If, for example, a scan of 100 fields using a 10X objective results in 400Mb of data then scanning the same area at 20X magnification will require 1. 6Gb of disk storage. You have the choice of when to save scans permanently and in which format. If a single camera frame requires about 4Mb of storage then, in the example shown, a total of 44Mb will be used to store the Z-Stack data. [. . . ] Note that due to the nature of Z-Stack acquisition it is only possible in "Standard" scanning mode. The Z-Stack technique acquires a series of images at a pre-defined Z "spacing" at each location in the scan pattern. You can control both the Z spacing and the total number of images within the stack. Z-2 The resulting stack of mosaic images can be smoothly replayed exactly as if the microscope focus knob is being adjusted. [. . . ]