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3DHISTECH - Hardware
Hardware
Our hardware consists of 4 versions of digital slide scanners. Every one of them gives you the opportunity to scan a sample on a glass slide at high resolution and at high speed.
Click the hardware products on the image to open their webpage.
The main common characteristics are as follows:
- High speed and precise moving of stage in X, Y and Z (focus) directions
- Automatic location of sample on the glass slide
- Main camera mounted outside of the scanner for easy and fast replacement
- Reading of all common 1D and 2D barcodes and automatic grouping of slides based on barcodes
- Compact size and well-designed form
Our latest development is the TMA Master, a semi-automatic machine for creating tissue microarray blocks. The TMA Master not only punches out and inserts the core in the recipient block but also saves the data of each core into a database so that MIRAX TMA can use it easily.
Also, you can use the manual TMA kit to produce tissue microarray blocks with up to 70 cores.
The technology
Our scanning technology is tile based. It means the scanner creates the magnified picture of the sample provided by the objective by taking thousands of Field of Views (FOVs) and then linking them together seamlessly.Image acquisition is realized via a high speed digital camera. The CCD chip is taking the middle of the picture given by the objective which means optical aberration is negligible. When the picture is taken the slide moving mechanism puts the slide in the next position for image acquisition while taking care of the focus value in the same time. The whole process takes milliseconds to execute and that enables us to scan an average slide in less than 3 minutes.
We have to cope with segments of lower quality. The section should have a universal thickness in every part of it. Everybody knows that this is sometimes almost impossible to achieve. Due to that the section is often creased or can be thicker at higher density places. Constant revision of focus value is necessary in order to get high quality pictures.
Sometimes that is not enough because the thickness can vary inside one FOV. In the traditional microscope it is easy to overcome as you can change the focus value continuously. Storing the digital image of a sample would be unwise as it would take up enormous storage space so we came up with the idea of extended focusing.
Extended focusing means that the picture of the FOV is taken using multiple focus values (the user can set the number of focus values and the difference between them) under and above the default one. When the image processing algorithm gets these pictures it creates one picture based on them by dividing the pictures to small tiles and then keeping the sharpest one. The result is a virtual slide that is focused in every single part of it. This is something you can not realize with the traditional microscope.
Optical resolution
| Objective | Camera adapter | Micrometer / pixel |
|
Zeiss Plan APOCHROMAT 20x/0.8 |
0.63 |
0.37 |
|
Zeiss Plan APOCHROMAT 20x/0.8 * |
1 |
0.23 |
|
Zeiss Plan APOCHROMAT 40x/0.95 |
0.63 |
0.18 |
|
Zeiss Plan APOCHROMAT 40x/0.95 |
1 |
0.12 |
For scanning speed information please click here!
* This is the default configuration.
