Upright and inverted polygon microscope (UNI-SCOPE)

Abstract

Cellular imaging in living animal has opened up a wide range of avenues to study cells in its microenvironment. High speed laser scanning microscopy possess the ability to observe fast real-time biological phenomena such as cell movements, cell division, cells death. Due to the anatomical difference of difference organs in small animals, there is a need to engineer a flexible microscope that can readily adapt to different imaging position. For videorate imaging, the design of a flexible microscope depends mainly on scanning devices. Existing multiphoton microscope platforms (i.e. Thorlabs Bergamo® II Series) uses a rotating objective mount to conform of the specimens. This is possible because of the compact resonant mirror scanners. However, for varying imaging speed using a polygon microscope, this approach is not feasible due to high rotating speed. As such, we developed a dual objective microscope system that can achieve both upright and inverted, we termed it as UNI-SCOPE. The integrated platform can achieve flexible scanning speed of up to 120 FPS with an overall footprint of 450mm*600mm*450mm. Using a dual objective approach, users can tailor the platform to the imaging sample.