Polarization microscopy with the LC-PolScope

Author Posting. © The Author(s), 2003. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Live Cell Imaging : A Laboratory Manual, edited by R. D. Goldman and D. L. Spector, :205-237. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2005. ISBN: 9780879696825.
In the current chapter we describe the use of a new type of polarized light microscope which we started to develop at the Marine Biological Laboratory about ten years ago. The new “PolScope” is based on the traditional polarized light microscope and enhances it with the use of liquid- crystal devices and special image processing algorithms. The LC-PolScope measures polarization optical parameters in many specimen points simultaneously, in fast time intervals, and at the highest resolution of the light microscope. It rapidly generates a birefringence map whose pixel brightness is directly proportional to the local optical anisotropy, unaffected by the specimen orientation in the plane of view, as well as a map depicting the slow axis orientation of the birefringent regions. The basic LC-PolScope technology can be adapted to most research grade microscopes and is available commercially from Cambridge Research and Instrumentation (CRI, http://www.cri-inc.com) in Woburn, Massachusetts, under the trade name LC-PolScope.
Financial support from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences and from the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering through grants GM49210 and EB002045, respectively.