US-based camera company Photometrics and German-based software company arivis, have teamed up to provide imaging and big data handling solutions to researchers to streamline their science. This partnership provides new imaging technology and software to produce more detailed data while handling those data efficiently.

In particular, light sheet microscopy is a key technology for live cell imaging, which involves selectively illuminating only the plane currently being imaged. This dramatically reduces negative side-effects otherwise caused by light. Light sheet systems require cameras with small pixels to work with low-magnification, but with highly resolving optics. To image larger samples with the required optics, the use of large pixel arrays to facilitate image-acquisition is needed.

The Iris 15™ Scientific CMOS camera from Photometrics offers an unmatched combination of features for light sheet microscopy. The camera enables researchers to obtain highly detailed data, with its 4.25 mm x 4.25 mm pixels and large field of view (FOV) of 25 mm diagonal. Using the full chip (5068 x 2968 pixels), 32 frames per second (fps) is possible.

To handle extremely large datasets, arivis has developed Vision4D. This modular piece of software allows easy handling of multi-channel 2D, 3D and 4D data sets, independent of the available RAM.

arivis Vision4D allows straight-forward data import of most image formats from microscopes as well as biological formats, and produces high performance interactive 3D and 4D rendering on standard computers with 3D graphics support. Intuitive tools for stitching and alignment create large multi-dimensional image stacks which can be immediately visualized in 2D, 3D and 4D. Analysis within its powerful Analysis Pipeline can be performed regardless of image size, which is perfect for cell segmentation, tracking, colocalization, quantitative measurements, interactive statistics and more. Once the analysis is complete, high resolution 3D/4D movies can be easily designed and exported for documentation and presentation purposes. To provide a seamless integration of custom workflows, scripting is possible. The software further supports efficient data sharing between collaborators via a standard web browser in a user-friendly way.

The combination of arivis Vision4D and the Iris 15 with its resolving power, sensitivity and speed offers key benefits to researchers involved in light sheet microscopy.