New Swept Field Confocal Microscope

The illuminating photons are focused through a row of 32 stationary pinholes over the specimen so each point in the specimen is illuminated 300 times/sec. The emission photons are de-scanned and focused through a complementary row of pinholes on the image side, and from there onto the face of a high-sensitivity charge-coupled device (CCD) camera. Because the pinholes are stationary, the plate containing them can contain four rows of pinholes, with the pinhole size for each row selected to maximize both axial and lateral resolution for all of the most commonly used objective lenses for confocal microscopy.

This LiveScan microscope was developed by Nikon Instruments (Yokohama, Japan). "We expect the maximum scan to be substantially higher than any existing system,” commented Stan Schwartz, marketing vice president, Nikon Instruments. "It's also faster, and more versatile and accurate than a spinning disk.”




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