UC Irvine

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).