Novel multispectral imaging microscope with applications to biomedicine

This paper describes a novel multispectral imaging microscope that can simultaneously record both spectral and spatial information of a sample, which can take advantage of spatial image processing and spectroscopic analysis techniques. A Liquid Crystal Tunable Filter device is used for fast wavelength selection and a cooled two-dimensional monochrome CCD for image detection. In order to acquire images that are not so dependent on imaging devices, a clever CCD exposure time control and a software based spectral and spatial calibration process is performed to diminish the influence of illumination, optic ununiformity, CCD's spectral response curve and optic throughput property. A set of multispectral image processing and analysis software package is developed, which covers not only general image processing and analysis functions, and also provides powerful analysis tools for multispectral image data, including multispectral image acquisition, illumination and system response calibration, spectral analysis and etc. The combination of spatial and spectral analysis makes it an ideal tool for the applications to biomedicine. In this paper, two applications in biomedicine are also presented. One is medical image segmentation. Using multispectral imaging techniques, a mass of experiments on both marrow bone and cervical cell images showed that our segmentation results are highly satisfactory while with low computational cost. Another is biological imaging spectroscopic analysis in the study of pollen grains in rice. The results showed that the transmittance analysis of multispectral pollen images can accurately identify the pollen abortion stage of male-sterile rice, and can easily distinguish a variety of male sterile cytoplasm.