Image Acquisition Example

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The program is designed for coordinating image acquisition using the Qimaging XOP (WaveMetrics) and Qimaging Retiga Exi Fast 1394 monochrome cooled CCD camera from Qimaging with a laser combiner (for a HeCd and Ar ion laser providing laser lines of 442, 488, and 514 nm) manufactured by Prairie Technologies (www.prairie-technologies.com).

The laser intenstiy and "shuttering" are controlled through a NEOS acoustic optical tunable filter using an Instrutech ITC-18 data acquisition board. The ITC-18 is controlled by the ITC18 XOP furnished by Instrutech, now downloadable from HEKA.

The eventual goal is to add patch-clamp electronphysiological data acquisition to the program using the ITC-18. The setup is designed to acquire fluorescence resonsance energy transfer (FRET) imaging data using Total Internal Reflectance Fluorescence (TIRF) imaging modality on an Olympus IX71 inverted microscope equipped with a 60x 1.45 na objective.

Submitted by
Stephen R. Ikeda, M.D., Ph.D.
Chief, Lab. of Molecular Physiology
National Institutes of Health
National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism

See the Cameras page and the Data Acquisition page for links to camera and framegrabber manufacturers as well as specific Igor plugins (XOPs) for image acquisition.