The advent of the internet has opened the door to remote computing, remote file sharing
and remote instrumentation control. We have taken advantage of these capabilities to: (1)
satisfy our need for 24-hour access to the laser-microscope, and (2) facilitate collaboration
and networking with investigators from other locations around the world. The remote
operation of microscope systems has been demonstrated for electron microscopes
(Chumbley, et al., 2002, Hadida-Hassan, et al., 1999, Takaoka, et al., 2000, Yamada, et al.,
2003), for light microscope evaluation of fixed samples (Kaplan et al., 2002, Molnar, et al.,
2003), and for laser scanning confocal microscopy (Youngblom, et al. 2001). Though there
has been significant progress in developing real-time microscopy and radiological image
sharing over the internet, this has not been extended to the domain of real-time
interventional manipulation of live cells, tissues, and organelles (Botvinick & Berns, 2005).
Technology is revolutionizing the biomedical field with the latest development of automatic
image processing algorithms and real-time robotic devices in the study of scale of microns
and even nanometers. Automated image processing algorithms have been successfully
applied to tracking neurons (Cohen, et al., 1994, He, et al., 2003), Caenorhabditis elegans
(Bao, et al., 2006), and sperm cells (Shi, et al., 2006a & 2006b, Nascimento, et al., 2006),
identifying Sphacelaria algae (Yeom & Javida, 2006) and soil bacteria (Bloem, et al., 1995),
and live embryos (Brodland & Veldhuis, 1998). Robotic telemicroscopy has been developed
for general applications (Lin, et al., 2003, Botvinick & Berns, 2005) and is currently being
applied to pathology (Szymas, et al., 2001, Della Mea, et al., 2000, Burgess et al., 2002) and
microsurgery (Knight, et al., 2005, Kuang, et al., 2005).