One square millimeter of the microcosmos
One square millimeter of the microcosmos
The Background Story
One of my doctoral colleagues was working on a project to accelerate the super-resolution imaging process, which should make it possible to acquire extensive image data in just a few hours. The goal was to image an area of one square millimeter with very high resolution in the range of single nanometers. This area might not sound too big for our daily length scales, but if you imagine that a single cell is about the size of a few micrometers, i.e. a thousandth of a millimeter, then quite a lot of cells fit onto one square millimeter. However, by establishing this imaging capability, a new problem arose.
How can we visualize such a huge landscape filled with single cells? Usually, data is prepared and formatted for publications to fit on a sheet of paper. Printing information in this size has great limitations, because details are lost due to printing resolution and color-depth.
How can we visualize such a huge landscape filled with single cells? Usually, data is prepared and formatted for publications to fit on a sheet of paper. Printing information in this size has this great limitation of printer resolution and color-depth.
How can we visualize such a huge landscape filled with single cells? Usually, data is prepared and formatted for publications to fit on a sheet of paper. Printing information in this size has this great limitation of printer resolution and color-depth.
The Problem
The Problem
The Problem
The Solution
That's why we decided to go digital and create an interactive map, visualizing this nanoscopic world on a computer screen. The interface is based on the open-source package OpenSeadragon and delivers Google Maps-like experience to examine super-resolution microscopy data.
Supervision
Ralf Jungmann
Project Lead
Florian Schüder
Image Stiching
Maximilian Strauss