Talk:Confocal microscopy

Early discussion

Patent Date is 1961. I changes the date from 1957 to 1961 for the reasons stated in Talk: Marvin Minsky.

Note as well the following excerpt from August 1994 Scientific American "Confocal Microscopy" by Dr. Jeffrey Lichtman:

Confocal Microscopy; August 1994; Scientific American Magazine; by Lichtman; 6 Page(s)

Marvin Minsky is famous as the father of artificial intelligence, but he was also the author of another signal achievement. In the 1950s, as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, he built a revolutionary light microscope that enabled him to view successively deeper layers in a specimen with astonishing clarity, without first having to undertake the laborious task of cutting the specimen into thin sections. Minsky's invention did not earn wide acclaim at the time. In fact, when he patented his "double-focussing stage-scanning microscope" in 1961, few people understood what it could do. During the 17-year life of the patent, he received no royalties, and no instruments of similar design were manufactured. Unappreciated for his foray into optics, Minsky moved on to other challenges, leaving his prototype to rust in a corner of his basement.

Thirty years later his approach--otherwise known as confocal microscopy--has caught on with a vengeance. Indeed, the technology is proving to be one of the most exciting advances in optical microscopy in this century. The extent to which current interest was sparked by rediscovery of Minsky's early work or by independent reinvention of his concept by others is not completely clear. Nevertheless, the happy result is that scores of different kinds of confocal microscopes are now available--in forms that range from rudimentary to baroque. Whether researchers need to image the ultrastructure of potato chips or computer chips, the diseased eye or the developing brain, confocal microscopy is allowing them to see their subjects quite literally in a new light.

It seems this article should be read and incorporated into this wiki. --SafeLibraries 03:37, 6 August 2006 (UTC)

Laser scanning confocal no longer suffer from the limitation of poor frame rate. please review

[Fluorescence] The article seems to suggest that conventional, traditional microscopes function via fluorescence. Perhaps traditional direct, visible-light, non-fluorescent observation is uncommon (this in not my field), but I don't think so. I didn't want to edit the text, though, not knowing enough about the topic. Nikevich (talk) 12:42, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

No, you are quite correct. Conventional Light microscopy can (and originally did exclusively) use direct light (brightfield illumination), and fluorescence techniques came much later. There are a variety of other methods of illumination too, such as dark-field illumination (which reverses the contrast so that the background is dark and the specimen is bright, phase contrast and various types of interference contrast including Differential interference contrast microscopy and phase contrast. Don't be afraid to edit the text. Plantsurfer (talk) 13:30, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

The article also seems to suggest that fluorescence is a necessary condition for confocal microscopy, which is false; it just happens to be the common practice for biologists. Tkircher (talk) 19:12, 25 April 2009 (UTC)

Diagram

{{reqdiagram}}

This just needs to be translated to English. You can do it easily using SVG Translate. --pfctdayelise (talk) 12:39, 29 July 2008 (UTC)

I feel like an explanation is needed

What is "point illumination" and a "spatial pinhole"? Blafreniere (talk) 06:03, 17 September 2010 (UTC)

Merging confocal laser scanning microscopy into confocal microscopy

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.

To merge Confocal laser scanning microscopy into Confocal microscopy, removing redundancy. Klbrain (talk) 09:17, 14 May 2016 (UTC)

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I suggest merging Confocal laser scanning microscopy with Confocal microscopy. Confocal laser scanning microscopy should be a subsection of Confocal microscopy. Both articles contain the same diagram and the introductory information is redundant. Mllyjn (talk) 03:43, 21 March 2012 (UTC)

Good idea. Butterfly reflections (talk) 21:49, 31 August 2012 (UTC)

I would also agree. While I have not used other forms of confocal microscopy I have used confocal laser scanning and it belongs as a subsection of confocal microscopy. Just need someone with the time to do it. -Tgru001 (talk) 02:07, 4 November 2012 (UTC)

I don't quite agree. Confocal laser scanning microscopy is only one technique, and it's already mentioned in the article. It would disrupt the flow of the article to include a full section on confocal laser scanning microscopy without also providing more detailed explanations of the other techniques. Until we have those, the article would be incomplete. --Iamozy (talk) 17:44, 8 January 2014 (UTC)

As it's written now, much of the Confocal laser scanning microscopy article is redundant with Confocal microscopy. The "Image Formation" section could be merged into "Basic Concept." (and perhaps renamed "Physical Principals.") The "Uses" section really applies to all confocal microscopy and "Resolution Enhancement" could be merged with "Variants and enhancements." Mllyjn (talk) 21:49, 8 January 2014 (UTC)

I would add that a diagram of a laser scanning microscope would be really welcome for visitors to see the differences with the original design, if anybody has that ... (if I remember, it should be quite a bit simpler than the original design) PierreBarbierDeReuille (talk) 12:28, 15 July 2014 (UTC)

Not sure what you mean by 'original design'. would that image help? Dietzel65 (talk) 21:59, 1 November 2014 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

ellipsoid?

"The point spread function of the pinhole is an ellipsoid,"

someone needs to say why a point (actually a tiny circle) allows an asymmetric (non-circular) pattern of light through 67.162.165.126 (talk) 21:20, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

Ellipsoid, not ellipse. The long axis of this ellipsoid is along the microscope axis, not radially. There's no asymmetry as you describe. Andy Dingley (talk) 08:55, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

When I can actually upload files with this account I'll put in images of confocal and WF PSFs and discuss this better. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Methylman251 (talk • contribs) 07:09, 14 December 2014 (UTC)

External links

While cleaning up after Amadori Heyns (talk · contribs)'s spamming of leica-microsystems.com, I came across this article. I removed the external links section because the links appeared to fail WP:EL, especially WP:ELNO#1. I've copied them below for discussion. --Ronz (talk) 19:22, 3 October 2014 (UTC)

• Confocal Microscopy - Optical Path: Leica Science Lab
• Emory’s Physics Department. Introduction to confocal microscopy and fluorescence.
• The Science Creative Quarterly's overview of confocal microscopy - high res images also available.
• Kurt Thorn's short talk: "Optical Sectioning and Confocal Microscopy"
• Introduction to Spinning Disk Confocal Microscopy - Zeiss Campus

Starting 1985: Laser point scanners with beam scanning

The last paragraph in this section currently states

> Developments at the University of Stockholm around the same time led to a commercial clsm distributed by the Swedish company Sarastro

I would guess that clsm stands for Confocal Laser Scanning Microscope, but I'm not sure. The acronym (if used) needs to be clearly defined earlier and then capitalized on every use. Ideally, the article can be written without using the acrpnym at all. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 210.212.192.131 (talk) 09:56, 18 June 2015 (UTC)

Confocal plane of which lenses?

The first sentence of the article contains "a spatial pinhole placed at the confocal plane of the lens". According to Confocal, confocal is the coincidence of two foci, not that of a single lens. So which lenses (or other objects) have foci that coincide at the spatial pinhole?--Wikimedes (talk) 14:55, 30 January 2017 (UTC)

With confocal laser scanning microscopy the typical setup is an illuminating pinhole right after the light source and a detector pinhole right before the photomultiplier. This is what Minsky's patent sketch in the article actually shows, who knows what is being discussed.

The confocal focal planes are the plane scanned in the object and the light detected by the detector. The plane scanned in the object can be chosen at a somewhat precise depth, and the pinhole in front of the detector can remove all out of focus light to allow only light arising from the same plane as was scanned to reach the detector.

MicroscopyU and other online sources discuss and illustrate this. --2602:306:CD1E:44B0:689D:1280:6D04:BC35 (talk) 20:03, 11 October 2017 (UTC)

Confocal Microscopy versus Fluorescence Microscopy

This article is all over the place. Confocal Laser Scanning Microscopy may be most often used as a biological fluorescence technique, but that's not what CLSM is. This article describes CLSM as a fluorescence technique, but somehow the opening diagram is of red light illuminating a sample that then gives off blue light. Make up your minds!

This is a badly written article. I've been thoroughly put in my place in the past for attempting to edit the crap out of science articles on Wikipedia (yeah, I know, it's my fault for not being nice in the face of 8-year-old shit piles, or, probably it's my fault for being female and appearing to have some level of expertise). I'd just like to add a "this article sucks big time and shouldn't be read, indexed, or returned by search engines" tag rather than gather the article's owner trolls to attack for not agreeing with it. Is there such a tag?

--2602:306:CD1E:44B0:689D:1280:6D04:BC35 (talk) 19:38, 11 October 2017 (UTC)

File:Depth Coded Phalloidin Stained Actin Filaments Cancer Cell.png to appear as POTD soon

Hello! This is a note to let the editors of this article know that File:Depth Coded Phalloidin Stained Actin Filaments Cancer Cell.png will be appearing as picture of the day on December 24, 2017. You can view and edit the POTD blurb at Template:POTD/2017-12-24. If this article needs any attention or maintenance, it would be preferable if that could be done before its appearance on the Main Page. — Chris Woodrich (talk) 02:05, 9 December 2017 (UTC)

Picture of the day

An osteosarcoma cell that was stained with phalloidin to visualise actin and imaged using a confocal microscope. The image was then deconvolved using a point spread function and colour coded to better show the position of the filaments.Photograph: Howard Vindin

Animation

Does the animation of the operating principle show the correct scheme? Shouldn't there be a lens to focus light on to the detector? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 117.222.145.169 (talk) 17:18, 28 January 2022 (UTC)