Optical Sectioning and Confocal Microscopy

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01:00:11.00 So, I am Kurt Thorn, director of the Nikon
01:00:14.00 Imaging Center at UC San Francisco
01:00:16.17 and I'm gonna be talking about
01:00:17.20 optical sectioning and confocal microscopy
01:00:19.28 and how we can use that to make
01:00:20.28 3-dimensional images of biological samples.
01:00:24.18 So, our goal is to
01:00:25.00 build three-dimensional images of
01:00:26.00 biological samples using a microscope.
01:00:28.00 And the example I'm showing here is an
01:00:31.00 embryonic mouse lung, it's about 200
01:00:34.00 microns thick and as you can see here in
01:00:37.00 this animation, we've captured a
01:00:38.00 three-dimensional image here, where we
01:00:40.00 can see the complete structure of this
01:00:42.00 this mouse lung in 3D and rotate it
01:00:45.00 around and look inside it and see what's
01:00:47.00 going on. And I'm going to talk now about
01:00:49.00 how we do that.
01:00:51.20 So, in order to build a
01:00:52.00 3-dimensional image, we first take a
01:00:55.00 bunch of images in separate slices
01:00:57.00 through the sample, at different heights
01:00:58.00 in the sample.
01:01:00.01 And so, on the left here is a panel
01:01:01.20 showing 12 images taken at
01:01:05.00 different heights through a yeast cell.
01:01:06.00 And, we have this set of two-dimensional
01:01:10.00 images and what we can do now is move
01:01:11.00 through the different images,
01:01:13.08 stacking them up into a 3-dimensional stack.
01:01:15.00 What we call a z-stack.
01:01:17.13 And so, I'm taking here
01:01:18.12 the bottom image, then the next
01:01:19.00 image, putting that on top, the image
01:01:21.00 after that, putting that on top, and so on
01:01:23.00 until we have a complete
01:01:24.00 three-dimensional stack of these images.
01:01:25.00 We can now take this in a computer and
01:01:28.00 have the computer calculate what this
01:01:30.00 structure would look like if viewed from
01:01:31.00 different angles. And that's how we get
01:01:33.00 these kinds of movies and I'm showing
01:01:34.00 down here a rotation around the axis of
01:01:38.00 these two yeast cells here, so that you
01:01:40.00 can now, from the set of 2D images,
01:01:42.00 appreciate their 3-dimensional structure
01:01:44.00 and layout.
01:01:48.01 So, how do we do this? We need
01:01:49.00 a microscope where we can take images at
01:01:52.00 different heights. So, we have our
01:01:53.00 sample here, illustrated by this little cube.
01:01:57.24 We take a picture of it until we
01:01:59.00 get a slice through the sample, which
01:02:00.00 looks like this rectangle.
01:02:02.14 We then step the focus.
01:02:04.09 We physically move the sample up or down.
01:02:07.03 In this case, we move the
01:02:08.00 sample down away from the objective to
01:02:09.00 get a second slice through a different
01:02:12.00 portion of our little cube here, so we
01:02:13.00 get a smaller rectangle.
01:02:15.15 And we can keep doing this,
01:02:16.00 getting slices through different parts
01:02:19.00 of this object and then we get, as I
01:02:21.00 showed before, a stack of these images
01:02:22.00 where we can now in the computer
01:02:25.00 assemble these into a three-dimensional
01:02:27.00 structure. And now we can
01:02:29.00 look through that at different angles to
01:02:31.00 generate a three-dimensional
01:02:32.00 reconstruction as how this would look if
01:02:34.00 viewed from different angles.
01:02:38.04 Here's another example
01:02:39.01 This is a worm, C. elegans,
01:02:41.00 expressing two different sensory
01:02:43.00 neurons labeled in green and red and I'm
01:02:45.00 showing here 85 Z slices moving through
01:02:48.00 the full thickness of the head of this worm.
01:02:49.00 And you can see, there's a lot of
01:02:51.00 information there but it's hard to
01:02:52.00 interpret what the connectivity of these
01:02:56.00 neurons is, what the sort of biological
01:02:58.00 structure is, just from the Z slices alone.
01:03:02.12 So, when we render those in 3D now,
01:03:05.00 we go and compute these views looking
01:03:07.00 through different orientations of the
01:03:09.00 sample. So, we get a rotation series, it's
01:03:11.00 now much easier to appreciate what the
01:03:12.00 geometry of these neurons is and what
01:03:14.00 the structure looks like.
01:03:16.08 So that hopefully motivates why
01:03:17.27 we want to be able to do this kind
01:03:19.14 of three-dimensional reconstruction.
01:03:22.28 So, the challenge in doing this kind of work
01:03:26.18 is that conventional microscopes,
01:03:28.15 a conventional wide field microscope,
01:03:30.18 sees both the in-focus information that is
01:03:32.23 the information that's in focus on the
01:03:34.08 Z slice we're looking at, as well as light
01:03:37.14 that comes from above and below there
01:03:39.04 from other regions on the sample that
01:03:40.11 aren't in focus. And so, you can see in
01:03:41.00 this conventional image here. This is an
01:03:44.00 image just of a piece of mouse tissue.
01:03:46.00 You can see that there's a lot of blurry,
01:03:49.00 fuzzy out-of-focus light here in
01:03:51.00 addition to these, you know, sharp edges.
01:03:52.00 There's they're overlay with this
01:03:54.00 blurry out-of-focus light and that
01:03:56.00 reduces our ability to see what's going on.
01:03:59.00 If we use something called a confocal
01:04:01.00 microscope, which blocks that
01:04:03.00 out-of-focus light, you see that this
01:04:05.00 image now gets much sharper and much
01:04:07.00 crisper because we're only seeing the
01:04:08.00 in-focus information. We're not seeing the
01:04:10.00 light that came from out of focus.
01:04:13.00 And so, this is what I'm going to talk about
01:04:14.00 for most of the rest of this talk is how one
01:04:17.00 of these confocal microscopes works,
01:04:18.22 how it rejects this out-of-focus light,
01:04:20.14 and how it enables us to get these nice
01:04:22.00 crisp in-focus slices, which we can then
01:04:24.00 use to do 3-dimensional reconstruction
01:04:26.00 of objects.
01:04:28.07 So, if we consider how a
01:04:29.00 conventional microscope works when
01:04:31.00 illuminating a single point in our
01:04:32.00 sample, we've got this blue excitation
01:04:34.00 light coming in here, it's brought to a
01:04:36.00 focus to a spot in our cyan sample, and
01:04:38.00 that spot emits light. That light is
01:04:41.00 collected by the objective lens and focus
01:04:43.00 to a corresponding point on our camera
01:04:45.00 by the tube lens.
01:04:46.26 So, we see this green spot in our sample
01:04:49.11 in focus.
01:04:50.29 However,
01:04:51.00 there is also light coming from other
01:04:53.00 regions in the sample, such as these
01:04:55.00 points out of focus and above our sample.
01:04:57.00 And that light will be collected by the
01:05:00.00 objective and the tube lens. But it
01:05:01.00 doesn't come to a focus on the camera, it
01:05:03.00 comes to a focus somewhere behind it.
01:05:05.00 And so, that will give rise to a disc of
01:05:06.00 fuzzy out of focus light overlaying our
01:05:09.00 in-focus image.
01:05:10.16 So, we see both the
01:05:12.00 out-of-focus light from this spot here,
01:05:13.00 as well as the in-focus light from the
01:05:15.00 spot we want to image.
01:05:18.04 So that, the problem here
01:05:19.07 is that fluorescence is emitted along
01:05:21.03 the entire illuminated cone of this spot
01:05:23.01 in our microscope
01:05:23.29 not just at the focus.
01:05:27.09 So, the trick in a confocal microscope
01:05:29.17 is to physically block that out-of-focus light.
01:05:31.22 And the way we do that is by replacing
01:05:33.09 our camera here with a pinhole.
01:05:35.07 And that pinhole is placed such that it
01:05:38.11 exactly will pass the light that's in-focus,
01:05:41.08 that light will come to a focus at that spot,
01:05:42.25 make it through the pinhole and reach
01:05:43.18 the detector.
01:05:44.24 So, if we now I draw the
01:05:45.19 emitted light from that in-focus spot,
01:05:47.17 you see it comes here and crosses out
01:05:48.27 of focus exactly where the pinhole is
01:05:50.24 placed, which means it will make it
01:05:52.17 through that pinhole, reach the detector,
01:05:54.24 and be recorded by our microscope.
01:05:56.26 If we now consider the corresponding
01:05:58.00 out-of-focus light, it will make this big
01:06:02.00 fuzzy disc on the pinhole, which will
01:06:04.00 block the majority of that light and
01:06:05.00 prevent it from reaching the detector.
01:06:07.00 So now, we have we've arranged our
01:06:10.00 microscopes such that we only see the
01:06:11.00 in-focus information.
01:06:12.22 The out-of-focus information never
01:06:14.04 makes it to the detector.
01:06:15.21 So, this gives us a way of just
01:06:16.26 recording the in-focus light.
01:06:19.16 The problem now is
01:06:20.24 we're only imaging a single spot.
01:06:22.27 And to get an image you need more
01:06:24.09 than a single point.
01:06:25.25 And the way we solve that problem
01:06:27.00 is by recording lots of
01:06:30.00 different points in our sample,
01:06:31.18 arrayed across it.
01:06:32.17 And so, the idea is if you have
01:06:33.00 your sample here, you build up a grid of
01:06:36.01 points you want to record,
01:06:37.29 and then you march the laser spot,
01:06:40.00 the focal spot
01:06:40.22 across the sample point by point.
01:06:43.06 And then use that to record the intensity
01:06:45.07 at each spot on the sample
01:06:46.10 and reconstruct that image
01:06:47.28 as a 2D grid of points.
01:06:53.08 So, to do this, we need a way to focus our
01:06:56.00 light to a single spot so that we can
01:06:57.00 detect the corresponding in-focus
01:07:00.00 information coming from that spot.
01:07:02.14 And to do that
01:07:03.19 we use a laser because it gives
01:07:05.00 highly collimated illumination and also
01:07:07.00 high power so that we can very quickly
01:07:09.00 record this fluorescence from the spot.
01:07:11.00 Since we need to record many many spots
01:07:13.00 to build up an image, we don't want to
01:07:14.00 spend a long time looking at each one or
01:07:16.00 it'll take us forever to get an image.
01:07:17.29 So, the idea is we bring in this this
01:07:19.00 collimated beam and as you can see here
01:07:21.00 a collimated beam gives us a
01:07:23.00 single focal point in the sample and we
01:07:25.00 can record that information.
01:07:27.05 How do we move that spot, right?
01:07:28.18 It doesn't do us any good
01:07:29.27 to just image a single spot in our sample.
01:07:31.14 We want to have this grid of spots.
01:07:33.14 And so, to do that, we can change the angle
01:07:36.02 of illumination as it enters the objective.
01:07:39.05 And so, see here, if we come
01:07:40.20 in with light that's coming
01:07:42.04 perpendicular to the plane of the
01:07:44.06 objective here, it comes to a focus
01:07:46.03 exactly in the center of the field of view.
01:07:48.10 If we now tilt that beam so it's
01:07:49.22 coming at an angle, we move the focal
01:07:52.07 spot off axis and so we can now record
01:07:54.23 from the left side of this object.
01:07:56.21 If we instead change the angle to the other
01:07:58.00 orientation we now record a spot from
01:08:01.00 the right side of the sample.
01:08:02.25 So, by changing the angle of illumination
01:08:05.18 as it enters the objective,
01:08:07.01 we can move the illumination spot
01:08:08.13 across the sample.
01:08:12.08 You might be wondering now
01:08:13.24 how we still detect the
01:08:15.22 or how we still block the out-of-focus light?
01:08:17.05 Because now our spot will no longer
01:08:19.25 necessarily be coincident with a pinhole.
01:08:22.00 Right, before we had the pinhole drawn
01:08:23.14 exactly on the center of this optical axis
01:08:26.11 of our microscope.
01:08:27.17 And now as we move the focal spot off axis,
01:08:29.27 how do we make sure that that light
01:08:31.17 still reaches the pinhole and goes
01:08:33.01 through it, and doesn't get blocked by
01:08:34.10 the pinhole.
01:08:35.15 So, here's the optical path of the
01:08:36.24 confocal microscope that allows
01:08:38.04 us to do the scanning.
01:08:40.07 And the heart of it is
01:08:41.05 this set of scanning mirrors here,
01:08:43.00 which allow us to rotate the angle at
01:08:44.23 which the laser beam enters the
01:08:46.03 objective, and thereby move the spot
01:08:48.18 across the field of view,
01:08:49.27 across our sample.
01:08:52.04 So, if you follow this here, we
01:08:53.01 have a laser that enters our microscope.
01:08:56.10 It's scanned by these scanning mirrors
01:08:57.29 here, that change its angle so that once
01:09:00.08 it's focused by the objective, the spot
01:09:02.01 it illuminates in our sample changes.
01:09:05.08 Now, if you imagine what's going on with
01:09:06.21 the light that's emitted by that spot,
01:09:08.15 it's going to come out, be collected by
01:09:10.06 the objective, and it's going to come out
01:09:11.19 at the same angle it entered.
01:09:13.10 Because the objective maps angles into
01:09:15.08 position.
01:09:16.08 And so, the light that comes
01:09:17.29 from that emitted spot, that excited spot,
01:09:20.22 is coming out of the same angle that
01:09:22.15 the laser beam entered.
01:09:23.26 And do if we don't move these mirrors
01:09:27.12 that emitted light will be reflected
01:09:28.25 by these mirrors along exactly the same
01:09:30.17 path that the laser came in along.
01:09:32.14 And so that means that the light
01:09:34.28 here is always coming in the same
01:09:36.08 direction regardless of what spot it
01:09:37.22 came from because the scanning mirrors
01:09:39.01 exactly undo the angle change that we
01:09:41.01 apply to the illumination light.
01:09:43.06 They exactly undo that angle change
01:09:44.22 on the emitted light.
01:09:46.11 So, then all we need is a dichroic mirror,
01:09:48.00 this 45-degree mirror here,
01:09:50.05 which separates that emitted light
01:09:51.15 from the laser. And now we can pass
01:09:53.12 that through our pinhole again and it
01:09:55.12 will reach the detector regardless of
01:09:58.07 where it came from on the sample.
01:10:00.09 So, by using the same pair
01:10:01.28 of scanning nerves twice,
01:10:02.24 once to scan the illuminated light,
01:10:04.09 and a second time to de-scan the
01:10:05.25 emitted light, we can keep our pinhole
01:10:09.02 fixed because the emitted light will
01:10:11.02 always come back along the same path
01:10:12.14 regardless of where it came from in the
01:10:13.17 sample.
01:10:14.19 So that makes this construction
01:10:15.21 really simple.
01:10:16.09 We just have a single fixed pinhole,
01:10:17.20 we put a detector behind it
01:10:19.03 and now we can see the emitted light
01:10:20.26 regardless of where it came from in the
01:10:22.11 sample.
01:10:26.09 So, the detector required for a
01:10:29.04 confocal microscope is a little bit
01:10:31.07 different than a detector for an
01:10:32.17 ordinary microscope,
01:10:33.10 where we can just use a camera.
01:10:35.05 First off, we don't need a
01:10:36.07 camera because we're only imaging a
01:10:37.20 single spot at a time,
01:10:38.20 we're just imaging the total amount of light
01:10:40.10 that comes to the pinholes.
01:10:41.10 We don't need any ability to detect
01:10:42.18 where it came from.
01:10:44.18 But we want to be very fast.
01:10:46.02 Because again, we have to
01:10:46.28 scan the spot over the sample, and so if
01:10:48.09 it takes us, you know, a second to collect
01:10:50.15 an image it's going to take us hours to
01:10:51.29 build up an image.
01:10:53.10 So instead we use a
01:10:54.08 detector, a photomultiplier tube
01:10:57.07 principally because it's very fast.
01:10:58.22 And so, a photomultiplier tube can respond
01:11:00.11 in nanoseconds to light impinging on it.
01:11:05.00 And so, this allows us to collect a single
01:11:06.27 pixel in our confocal image in only a
01:11:08.17 few microseconds.
01:11:10.17 I don't want to say a whole lot
01:11:11.11 about photomultiplier tubes
01:11:12.20 and how they work,
01:11:14.23 but I'll just briefly describe their operation.
01:11:16.28 And so, the idea is we have
01:11:18.11 a light beam that enters the
01:11:20.00 photomultiplier tube and it hits an
01:11:24.00 object called a photo-cathode,
01:11:25.00 which converts it to electrons.
01:11:26.24 And those electrons are then excited by a
01:11:30.29 high voltage onto an electrode here,
01:11:33.16 and they they're moving fast enough
01:11:35.05 that when they hit that electrode
01:11:36.03 they kick out additional electrons.
01:11:39.14 And by putting a series of these
01:11:41.02 electrodes in our order here,
01:11:43.24 we can multiply the signal by a
01:11:46.22 very large amount.
01:11:47.28 Most photomultiplier tubes
01:11:48.29 have multiplications on the order
01:11:50.12 of a million or ten million.
01:11:53.10 So that a single photon that enters the
01:11:55.00 photomultiplier tube will give rise to
01:11:57.00 say 10 million electrons at the anode
01:12:00.00 here at the end of this multiplication
01:12:01.00 chain, which will be very easy to detect.
01:12:06.00 So, that means that these are sensitive
01:12:08.00 to very low light levels and they're
01:12:10.00 very fast so, you know, in a few
01:12:12.00 microseconds we can record a bunch of
01:12:13.00 photons from a single pixel in our
01:12:15.00 sample, and then use that to record the
01:12:18.00 intensity there, and then move on to the
01:12:20.00 next pixel and repeat this process.
01:12:22.09 So, putting this all together, here's again
01:12:24.17 our non-confocal image on the right,
01:12:27.02 our confocal image on the left,
01:12:28.24 and you can now see how this works.
01:12:30.17 We've taken the out-of-focus light
01:12:34.00 that's in the non-confocal version here,
01:12:35.00 and completely eliminated it by scanning the
01:12:37.00 spot across the sample and all these pixels,
01:12:39.16 and only recording the light
01:12:40.26 that's in focus and makes it through our
01:12:42.00 pinhole.
01:12:45.17 And again, putting this all together
01:12:47.00 in a 3D context.
01:12:48.02 If we take many of these images
01:12:49.03 at different heights and then
01:12:52.06 reconstruct them in the computer,
01:12:53.10 we can get very beautiful images like this
01:12:56.00 high magnification view of the mouse
01:12:58.00 lung I showed you earlier, where we can
01:13:00.00 now see individual cells.
01:13:00.16 And so, if you look at this,
01:13:02.06 you can see the outlines of
01:13:04.00 these individual cells, here the black
01:13:05.00 areas in the center are the cytoplasm.
01:13:08.00 We've only labeled the cell membranes here.
01:13:11.16 And so, this is the real strength of
01:13:13.00 confocal imaging is getting
01:13:15.00 high-resolution 3D images of thick
01:13:18.00 biological samples
01:13:20.16 So, what's it not so good at.
01:13:22.19 So, there's a couple drawbacks of
01:13:24.00 it to a confocal microscope as I've
01:13:26.00 described it here, which is called a
01:13:27.00 laser scanning confocal microscope
01:13:29.00 because we use a laser scanning across
01:13:31.00 the sample to build up the image.
01:13:32.20 The first is, as I've mentioned,
01:13:34.00 we're building up this image
01:13:35.26 point by point.
01:13:37.03 And even though we have these fast PMT's
01:13:39.07 if you have,
01:13:39.13 if you spend a microsecond at each pixel and
01:13:42.00 you want to record a 1-megapixel image,
01:13:44.00 that's still one second to record an image.
01:13:46.24 So, that means it's a slow
01:13:49.00 microscope generally. if you want to
01:13:50.02 follow things that are happening very
01:13:51.08 quickly this is not a great way to do it.
01:13:54.00 Secondly, it tends to not be incredibly
01:13:58.00 light efficient, we don't,
01:13:58.29 we lose a lot of light in this process.
01:14:00.25 And partly that's because
01:14:02.03 the photomultiplier tube is
01:14:04.11 not a fantastic detector for light
01:14:06.09 sensitivity.
01:14:07.25 It's very, has very high gain, it's very
01:14:10.00 fast, but it misses a lot of the photons
01:14:12.00 that hit it.
01:14:12.22 So, it only records something like
01:14:13.29 25% of the photons that arrive there.
01:14:17.04 And if you put these two things
01:14:18.00 together, that means if you're trying to
01:14:20.00 go very fast and you have a not really
01:14:22.00 high efficiency detector, it means you're
01:14:23.00 not generally recording very many
01:14:24.00 photons from each pixel.
01:14:25.12 So, for dim signals this doesn't work very well.
01:14:29.17 And so, the two big drawbacks of a laser
01:14:31.00 scanning confocal microscope is that
01:14:33.00 it's slow, and it's not really good for
01:14:35.00 very low light, very dim samples.
01:14:38.00 Fortunately, there's a solution to get
01:14:41.00 around this, which is instead of using a
01:14:43.00 single pinhole and a PMT we use many
01:14:45.00 pinholes in a camera.
01:14:46.15 And this allows us to address
01:14:47.00 both of these issues.
01:14:49.26 There are a number of geometries
01:14:51.10 you can use to do this.
01:14:52.23 Number of companies have made
01:14:54.00 different microscopes that use multiple
01:14:57.00 pinholes and cameras to record images.
01:14:59.00 But the most common one, and the one
01:15:00.13 that's achieved probably the largest usage,
01:15:02.28 is called the spinning disk confocal.
01:15:05.00 And so, that's the one I'll describe here.
01:15:07.16 So, a spinning disk confocal does is
01:15:09.16 instead of using a
01:15:11.00 single pinhole to illuminate the sample,
01:15:12.00 we put a disc that's punched with many
01:15:15.00 pinholes in it, and they're arranged in
01:15:17.00 a pattern that if we rotate this disc
01:15:19.00 around its axis, those pinholes will
01:15:21.00 sweep out across every point in our
01:15:23.00 sample once and only once.
01:15:24.22 So that for every rotation of the disc will
01:15:27.00 illuminate every point in our sample
01:15:29.00 once and only once.
01:15:29.25 And so, you can see
01:15:31.00 here we've got these pinholes
01:15:31.25 they're placed exactly in the same focal
01:15:34.02 plane as the laser scanning confocal
01:15:36.00 microscope.
01:15:37.08 But you can see now instead
01:15:39.00 of illuminating a single spot in our
01:15:40.00 specimen, we illuminate many spots
01:15:41.13 on our specimen.
01:15:42.26 And then because we're doing this and
01:15:44.23 the disk spins very fast, such that it'll
01:15:47.00 illuminate every point in our sample,
01:15:48.14 say in a micro or in a millisecond,
01:15:52.15 we can then just record the emitted light
01:15:55.25 onto a camera because we're now building up
01:15:58.00 an image by sweeping these pinholes out
01:16:00.00 across the sample, rather than moving a
01:16:02.00 single spot pixel by pixel.
01:16:05.29 And otherwise, the objects are basically
01:16:08.04 exactly the same.
01:16:09.15 The pinholes, we use the same
01:16:12.00 pinhole for excitation and emission.
01:16:14.02 The disc spins fast but it's been slow
01:16:16.00 compared to the speed of light so that
01:16:18.00 the emitted light makes it back to the
01:16:20.00 same pinhole that excited it.
01:16:22.07 And then the only other thing
01:16:23.03 we need to add is,
01:16:24.00 there's a technical refinement here,
01:16:26.00 which is to put microlenses,
01:16:27.22 a matched set of micro lenses,
01:16:30.21 in front of these pinholes,
01:16:31.15 such that we can focus our
01:16:33.00 laser beams tightly through the pinholes
01:16:36.00 in the spinning disk here to get
01:16:38.00 high light efficiency delivered to the
01:16:40.17 sample, so we can get most of our light
01:16:42.00 reaching the sample.
01:16:44.07 So, this solves our slow problem
01:16:45.00 because we're now learning
01:16:47.00 of many pinholes. We can collect an image
01:16:49.00 in milliseconds of the whole sample.
01:16:51.04 And it also eliminates a lot of our poor
01:16:56.00 light efficiency issues because we can
01:16:57.00 now use a very high efficiency CCD,
01:16:59.20 like an electron multiplying CCD,
01:17:01.15 or a back-thinned CCD,
01:17:03.20 to record the emitted light.
01:17:06.11 And so, we now record almost every
01:17:07.22 photon that leaves our sample.
01:17:10.18 This is what the pinholes look like.
01:17:12.17 So, this is just an image I took
01:17:13.26 of our spinning disc, where
01:17:16.00 we stopped the disc rotation.
01:17:16.18 So, the disc is parked
01:17:18.03 and just shine light through it.
01:17:19.29 And so, you can see there, here's the
01:17:22.00 pinhole grid of this little piece of the disc.
01:17:23.00 And it rotates such that these
01:17:26.00 pinholes will sweep out over every
01:17:28.00 point in the sample once and only once.
01:17:31.00 Here's an example of a movie acquired
01:17:33.00 with a spinning disk confocal.
01:17:33.22 So, this is a time-lapse movie
01:17:35.19 of a dividing Drosophila S2 cell.
01:17:40.13 This is about 15 minutes
01:17:43.16 compressed to you know
01:17:44.14 a few seconds here.
01:17:45.27 So, because they're fast and
01:17:48.00 high light efficiency,
01:17:48.24 spinning discs are very good for live samples.
01:17:51.12 Here's a 3-dimensional reconstruction
01:17:53.09 of a yeast cell expressing a
01:17:55.27 mitochondrially-targeted RFP.
01:17:57.11 These are actually the same
01:17:59.00 yeast cells I showed at the very
01:18:00.00 beginning of this talk.
01:18:01.07 So, it does a good job doing
01:18:02.01 3D reconstructions as well.
01:18:05.26 So, what's its downside?
01:18:08.25 So, imagine here
01:18:10.00 illuminating a single one of these
01:18:12.00 pinholes in the spinning disk.
01:18:13.08 In reality, they're all being illuminated
01:18:15.02 But let's just consider one.
01:18:16.20 So, you can see here in the center,
01:18:18.03 I've marked this one pinhole here
01:18:19.20 with a little green dot.
01:18:20.19 That's the guy who's exciting
01:18:22.17 So now, if the sample
01:18:25.00 is in focus, we'll create a little spot
01:18:26.00 of green in our sample. It'll emit and
01:18:29.00 we'll collect that in-focus light back
01:18:31.00 through that same pinhole.
01:18:31.23 Now what happens if we start moving
01:18:32.28 that sample out of focus?
01:18:35.14 What's going to happen is that the disc
01:18:37.01 of out-of-focus light is going to start to grow.
01:18:39.04 As it gets out of focus and the sample
01:18:41.27 gets further and further out of focus,
01:18:42.29 that disc is out of focus,
01:18:44.05 light gets bigger and bigger.
01:18:46.02 And eventually,
01:18:46.23 it'll be big enough that it's going to
01:18:48.15 overlap with adjacent pinholes in the disk.
01:18:50.29 And once that happens, we stop blocking
01:18:52.25 that out-of-focus light completely
01:18:54.06 because we're now picking it up through
01:18:55.05 these neighboring pinholes.
01:18:57.03 And so, this is the main limitation
01:18:58.21 of the spinning disc system is
01:19:00.06 that it has limited out-of-focus rejection.
01:19:02.16 If your sample is far enough out of focus,
01:19:04.17 That light will make it through adjacent pinholes
01:19:07.01 and that means that you're no longer
01:19:08.08 blocking all the out-of-focus light.
01:19:11.12 You can quantitate this.
01:19:14.00 And so, what I'm showing here
01:19:15.05 is a plot of basically how
01:19:17.04 much of the out of focus light is
01:19:18.14 transmitted as a function of how far out
01:19:21.02 of focus you are on the x axis.
01:19:23.04 And so, in this red curve here,
01:19:24.12 you can see the laser scanning confocal,
01:19:26.19 where no matter how far out of focus you get,
01:19:29.08 you continue to reject that light.
01:19:31.28 It, you know,
01:19:32.24 just you attenuate it more and more
01:19:34.00 the further out of focus it is.
01:19:35.24 The spinning disk here, shown in blue,
01:19:38.02 for small amounts of out-of-focus,
01:19:40.04 for small amounts of defocus,
01:19:41.20 performs exactly the same
01:19:42.22 as a laser scanning confocal.
01:19:44.10 This is where that that out-of-focus disc
01:19:47.00 isn't big enough to reach the adjacent
01:19:49.00 pinholes yet.
01:19:49.27 However, once it does reach
01:19:51.08 those adjacent pinholes you can see here
01:19:52.19 there's this plateau.
01:19:54.12 And once we get to that plateau,
01:19:55.16 basically we stop improving
01:19:56.27 our out of focus rejection.
01:19:58.23 And so, what this means is that
01:19:59.27 if your sample is really thick,
01:20:02.03 the out of focus light from
01:20:03.04 the far away parts are going to
01:20:05.21 contribute significant background
01:20:06.26 to your image that would normally
01:20:08.19 be blocked by a laser scanning confocal.
01:20:10.11 That's the difference between the
01:20:11.10 spinning disk curve here
01:20:12.19 and the laser scanning confocal.
01:20:15.08 And so, there's a crossover
01:20:19.00 point here, where for really thick
01:20:22.00 samples this laser scanning system will
01:20:23.00 be better than the spinning disk.
01:20:24.09 And that crossover is in the third
01:20:25.24 of 20 to 30 micron thick range.
01:20:28.11 That depends a little bit
01:20:29.17 on the spinning disk design
01:20:31.05 and the objective you're using
01:20:32.25 but for the commonly used 100x objective
01:20:35.00 and the Yokogawa's spinning disk system,
01:20:37.00 it's around 20 or 30 microns.
01:20:38.25 And so, for thicker samples you're not
01:20:41.14 going to see as much benefit from the
01:20:42.25 spinning disk as you would expect.
01:20:44.23 Doesn't mean that you can't use it.
01:20:46.07 It just means that it won't perform
01:20:47.10 as well as you might like.
01:20:50.16 So, putting this all together we can
01:20:52.22 come up with some general guidelines as
01:20:54.07 to when to use confocal microscopy.
01:20:56.20 And I'm going to talk separately here about
01:20:57.27 fixed samples and live samples because
01:21:00.24 fixed samples are much less sensitive to
01:21:02.25 the amount of light you put on them.
01:21:03.28 For live cells if you shine too much light
01:21:06.02 on them they die or you get photo damage
01:21:08.05 to the cells, which prevents you from
01:21:09.28 from getting the data you want.
01:21:11.21 So, for fixed samples, we can first consider
01:21:15.12 thin samples, or where you're working at
01:21:18.00 very low magnification, where the
01:21:20.00 thickness of your sample is not very
01:21:22.00 large compared to the focal volume of
01:21:24.00 your microscope, the region that your
01:21:26.00 microscope detects in focus.
01:21:27.05 So, if there's if essentially your whole sample
01:21:31.00 is in focus there's no out-of-focus
01:21:32.00 light and so confocal doesn't give you
01:21:34.00 any advantages.
01:21:34.12 You can just use ordinary
01:21:36.00 conventional widefield microscopy.
01:21:39.00 However, once your samples start getting
01:21:41.00 thick with respect to the in-focus
01:21:43.00 volume your microscope can record,
01:21:46.00 say if you're using 100x objective with a,
01:21:46.26 you know, 700 nanometer focal volume,
01:21:50.06 and your samples 10 microns thick,
01:21:51.28 then you now have an advantage
01:21:53.03 for doing confocal.
01:21:54.16 And typically for fixed specimens you would
01:21:57.00 use laser scanning confocal because the
01:21:59.00 out of focus rejection is better than
01:22:02.00 for a spinning disc system.
01:22:03.10 The one exception may be as if you're looking
01:22:06.00 at very dim fixed samples, where the higher
01:22:08.00 light sensitive view in spinning disc
01:22:09.00 might be an advantage.
01:22:10.18 As your samples get thicker,
01:22:12.27 you know sort of in a 30 to 50 micron range,
01:22:14.27 the laser scanning confocal gets better and
01:22:16.17 better because in this range the spinning disc
01:22:19.15 system stops rejecting as much
01:22:21.00 out of focus light as the laser scanning
01:22:22.15 system.
01:22:24.00 So, this is probably the preferred way to go.
01:22:27.00 And then as you get to even thicker
01:22:29.00 specimens beyond 100 or 200 microns
01:22:32.00 the laser scanning confocal starts to
01:22:34.00 have problems dealing with the amount of
01:22:36.00 out of focus light and then you need to
01:22:37.00 go to two-photon microscopy or other
01:22:39.00 specialized techniques, which we'll cover
01:22:40.00 in another lecture here.
01:22:45.01 For live samples it's a bit of a different story.
01:22:49.19 For thin
01:22:51.00 again, for thin and low magnification
01:22:53.00 samples, where your sample is thin
01:22:56.00 compared to the focal volume of your
01:22:57.00 microscope, generally you'd use wide
01:22:59.00 field systems here.
01:23:00.21 Because the confocal again
01:23:01.26 doesn't buy you any benefit,
01:23:05.00 there may be some advantage to using the
01:23:06.00 spinning disc because they seem to be
01:23:07.00 more live cell friendly than wide field.
01:23:09.00 But this depends a lot on the details of
01:23:12.00 your instrumentation and it's hard to give
01:23:13.00 general guidelines.
01:23:14.08 If your samples again are,
01:23:15.18 you know, thin but thicker than the
01:23:18.00 focal volume of your objective,
01:23:20.00 so, say again you know your 10 microns
01:23:22.00 cell and you're using 100x objective
01:23:23.00 with a 700 nanometer focal volume
01:23:25.22 and you need to do Z stacks,
01:23:27.01 you need to get slices through these guys,
01:23:28.14 then spinning discs is really the microscope
01:23:30.27 of choice.
01:23:33.01 For thick specimens,
01:23:34.16 it becomes a bit more of a toss-up here.
01:23:35.28 So, once you get to this range,
01:23:37.02 where the spinning disk is
01:23:39.00 no longer rejecting as much out-of-focus
01:23:41.00 light as the laser scanning system
01:23:44.00 it now starts to matter whether you really
01:23:47.00 need the extra out of focus rejection or
01:23:49.00 you need the more live cell friendliness
01:23:51.00 and higher sensitivity of the spinning disk.
01:23:51.29 And so, it's hard to give general
01:23:55.00 recommendations on this range because
01:23:56.00 you may find that the better
01:23:58.00 out of focus rejection and the laser
01:24:00.00 scanning system is necessary to get
01:24:01.00 crisp images. Or you may find that your
01:24:04.00 sample is not really densely labeled,
01:24:05.00 there's only small amount of
01:24:07.00 out of focus light, and so the higher
01:24:09.00 sensitivity and better live cell
01:24:10.00 friendliness of the spinning disk is an
01:24:12.00 advantage.
01:24:12.19 And again, when your samples
01:24:15.00 get really thick, two-photon microscopy,
01:24:17.00 another specialized technique come into
01:24:19.00 play and none of these systems are
01:24:21.00 really capable of handling it.

This Talk

Speaker: Kurt Thorn

Audience:

Educators of Adv. Undergrad / Grad
Researcher
Educators

Recorded: June 2009

Talk Overview

This talk introduces confocal microscopy, and discusses optical sectioning, reconstruction of 3D images, and how the laser-scanning confocal microscope and spinning disk confocal microscope work.

Questions

True or False. In a confocal microscope, the pinhole is placed between the scanning mirrors and the detector.
Which of the following comparisons of spinning disk versus laser point scanning confocal is incorrect?
1. Spinning disk but not laser scanning uses ccd cameras as the detector
2. Spinning disk uses different pinholes for the excitation and emission light paths
3. Spinning disk tends to produce less photodamage to the specimen
4. Spinning disk is a faster imaging technique
Why does the spinning disk produce an inferior z section than laser point scanning confocal when imaging 60 microns deep into a specimen?
1. The intensity of a laser point scanning confocal is inherently brighter
2. The PMT of a laser point scanning confocal is more efficient than the spinning disk camera
3. Out of focus light can be passed through adjacent pinholes in a spinning disk
4. The laser point scanning confocal rate can be adjusted to illuminate each point for longer
The pinhole of the confocal is used to:
1. Reduce the beam size of the excitation beam
2. Reject emission light from out-of-focus planes
3. Improve resolution
4. A and B
5. A, B and C

Answers

View Answers

Speaker Bio

Kurt Thorn

Kurt Thorn is an Assistant Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics at UCSF and Director of the Nikon Imaging Center – a facility that provides cutting edge light microscopy equipment to UCSF researchers. Kurt can be followed on his blog at http://nic.ucsf.edu/blog/. Continue Reading