3D Imaging Made Quicker, Easier

February 19, 2008 - Technology invented by scientists from The Johns Hopkins University and Ben-Gurion University of the Negev can make 3D imaging quicker, easier, less expensive and more accurate, the researchers said.

This new technology, dubbed FINCH, for Fresnel incoherent correlation holography, could have implications in medical applications such as endoscopy, ophthalmology, CT scanning, X-ray imaging and ultrasounds, co-inventor Gary Brooker said. It may also be applicable to homeland security screening, 3D photography and 3D video, he said.

A report presenting the first demonstration of this technology— with a 3D microscope called a FINCHSCOPE— will appear in the March issue of Nature Photonics and is available on the Nature Photonics Web site.

“Normally, 3D imaging requires taking multiple images on multiple planes and then reconstructing the images,” said Brooker, director of the Johns Hopkins University Microscopy Center on the university's Montgomery County Campus. “This is a slow process that is restricted to microscope objectives that have less than optimal resolving power. For this reason, holography currently is not widely applied to the field of 3D fluorescence microscopic imaging.”

The FINCH technology and the FINCHSCOPE uses microscope objectives with the highest resolving power, a spatial light modulator, a charge-coupled device camera and some simple filters to enable the acquisition of 3D microscopic images without the need for scanning multiple planes.

The Nature Photonics article reports on a use of the FINCHSCOPE to take a 3D still image, but moving 3D images are coming, said Brooker and co-inventor Joseph Rosen, professor of electrical and computer engineering at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel.

“With traditional 3D imaging, you cannot capture a moving object,” Brooker said. “With the FINCHSCOPE, you can photograph multiple planes at once, enabling you to capture a 3D image of a moving object. Researchers now will be able to track biological events happening quickly in cells.”

The research was funded by CellOptic Inc. and a National Science Foundation grant with the technology being demonstrated using equipment at the Johns Hopkins Montgomery County Campus Microscopy Center.

For more information: www.mcc.jhu.edu