New high-speed 3-D microscope gives deeper view of living things
Opening new doors for biomedical and neuroscience research, Elizabeth Hillman, associate professor of biomedical engineering at Columbia Engineering and of radiology at Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC), has developed a new microscope that can image living things in 3D at very high speeds. In doing so, she has overcome some of the major hurdles faced by existing technologies, delivering 10 to 100 times faster 3D imaging speeds than laser scanning confocal, two-photon, and light-sheet microscopy. Hillman's new approach uses a simple, single-objective imaging geometry that requires no sample mounting or translation, making it possible to image freely moving living samples. She calls the technique SCAPE, for swept confocally aligned planar excitation microscopy. Her study is published in the Advance Online Publication on Nature Photonics's website on January 19, 2015.