Our CDO Grégory was at the Fluorescence Microscopy Worskshop last week at Pasteur Paris to discover new usages and technologies in microscopy. Even if this event was mainly focused on super resolution microscopy, many tips and tools proved useful in HCS context, where speed and statistical results are often more important than the resolution race.

It is rather difficult to summarize such a rich event, but below you can find interesting things about tools and some tips from inspiring keynotes.

Leica presented their THUNDER Imaging Systems with an advanced “out-of-focus” filter and a robust PSF deconvolution. Really astonishing widefield devices! Bitplane shared functionalities of the new 9.3 version of Amaris, with a clearview function which is a deconvolution algorithm optimized to use GPU power of computers. We will test it soon on our 3D pictures! Thermo Scientific have shown the new 3D segmentation capabilities of the Amira software, really impressive… For Arivis, the future is “Terabytes + Virtual Reality” (our CDO loves that approach 🙂 ) and solutions like Vision4D, InViewR and WebView – collaboration tools were created in this endeavour . We also discovered the syGlass software from IstoVisio, Inc (a startup from Morgantown USA). They use VR (Virtual Reality) to help people to better observe 3D pictures, from MRI or CT scans to cells in 3D, or even data visualization. We were very impressed by the ease of use! Look at the video below, and “play” with a 3D picture to emphasize different structures! Definitively a tool to be tested in HCS Pharma !!!

From a scientific point of vue, the keynote by Dr Susan Cox (Royal Society University Research Fellow at King’s College London) “Seeing and believing at super-resolution” was highly appreciated. Dr Cox presented a deep travel in the concept of resolution, which is obviously a non-trivial concept! There are so many algorithms, methods, theories and tools to increase pictures’ resolution that we can forget, sometimes, a basic law: deconvolution means assumptions about pictures … Everytime we use a algorithm, it means we make a hypothesis about the picture of interest. If this hypothesis (which could be hidden) is our result, it is definitely a problem 🙂

We also particularly appreciated:

  • The amazing in vivo imaging of vasculature dynamics in a zebrafish described by Guy Malkinson (Center for Interdisciplinary Research in Biology, Collège de France, Paris)
  • The use of phase AND intensity of the light in fluorescence microscopy by Pierre Bon (Laboratoire Photonique, Numérique et Nanosciences, Institut d’Optique, Bordeaux).
  • The observation of nano-scale structures in axonal cytoskeleton by Christophe Leterrier (Neuropathophysiology Institute, Marseille)

We will now work to test all these news tools and methods in a HCS context! Of course, we will publish here the results of our investigations!

We want to thank the “Institut Parteur” for organizing this wondeful event, and especially the organizing committee from the “Education Department”. Well done!


Grégory MAUBON

Grégory MAUBON is Chief Data Officer and digital coordinator at HCS Pharma, a biotech startup focused in high content screening and complex diseases. He manages IT missions and leads digital usages linked to company needs. He is also a Augmented Reality Evangelist (presenter and lecturer) since 2008, where he created www.augmented-reality.fr and founded in 2010 RA'pro (the augmented reality promotion association). He helped many companies (in several domains) to define precisely their augmented reality needs and supported them in the implementation.

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