6th ESACP Congress, Heidelberg, April 7-11, 1999

A098
AN UPDATE ON THE USE OF DIGITAL MICROMIRROR DEVICES IN QUANTITATIVE MICROSCOPY
MacAulay C, Dlugan A

Cancer Imaging, BC Cancer Agency, Vancouver, Canada

There are many different modes of microscopy. All of these modes deliver light in a controlled fashion to the object to be examined and collect as much of the light containing the desired information about the object as possible. The system being presented replaces the simple irises or annuli of a conventional microscope with digital light processing units (digital micromirror devices, or DMDs, made by Texas Instruments) to produce a digital microscope. The DMDs are placed in the optical path at positions corresponding to conjugate image planes of the sample and the aperture diaphragm of a conventional microscope. This allows for more precise and flexible control over the spatial location, amount, and angles of the illumination light and the light to be collected. This digital microscope will introduce improvements to existing modes of microscopy, specifically in the field of quantitative microscopy. In various configurations, one can perform brightfield, darkfield, confocal, and fluorescence microscopy. In addition, new modes of microscopy will be possible, such as reconstruction microscopy. Using the intensity modulation feature of the DMDs, the system can also correct for inhomogeneous illumination sources to achieve uniform distributions. Alternatively, one can project images or information into the microscope field of view for specific applications.