The OpenFlexure Microscope is a 3D printable microscope, including a precise mechanical stage to move the sample and focus the optics. There are many different options for the optics, ranging from a webcam lens to a 100x, oil immersion objective.
It comes with a sophisticated guide that helps anyone print the microscope with any 3D printer, an open-source software to start using the microscope which works on Windows, Linux, and macOS, and rich tutorials to make its usage smooth and fun.
Optomechanics is a crucial part of any microscope; when working at high magnification, it is absolutely crucial to keep the sample steady and to be able to bring it into focus precisely.
Accurate motion control is extremely difficult using printed mechanical parts, as good linear motion typically requires tight tolerances and a smooth surface finish.
This design for a 3D printed microscope stage uses plastic flexures, meaning its motion is free from friction and vibration. It achieves steps well below 100 nanometers when driven with miniature stepper motors, and is stable to within a few microns over several days.
Key features
- High performance
- Low-cost
- Highly customizable
- Ready for lab works
Resources
Related Articles in Pathology
Microscope-PiCam is a free open-source web-based solution that acts as the soul of a Raspberry Pi based microscope.
It is an ideal solution for taking still images using a 12 MP HQ camera attached to a gemmological microscope.
The project has detailed instructions on how to setup your Raspberry Pi
MicroscoPy is an open-source MICROSCOPE built using LEGO bricks, 3D-printing, Arduino and Raspberry Pi.
The project is started by Yuksel Temiz, an engineer and a designer from Switzerland, who later released it as an open-source for educational purposes.
It is released and hosted by IBM, with full instructions, video tutorials
I planned to write about this amazing project months ago, soon after I wrote about OpenSeadragon library. I recommended the project already to my colleagues who are teaching at medical schools. Some of my relatives who are studying medicine.
The Human Protein Atlas is a Swedish-based project that started 2003
What's MicroDraw?
MicroDraw is a lightweight web-based collaborative annotation application for displaying and viewing large-scale (DeepZoom) images. It's completely free and open-source software that comes with no restrictions to use or to modify.
It's a self-hosted application which means it can be installed and hosted at private hosting for teams.
While consulting for medical projects over the years and working on some, I collected hundreds of domain-specific libraries and frameworks built to help developers make medical applications. However, many of the libraries were not supported or popular enough to survive as they were abandoned by their creators over the years.
What is Whole-slide image or Virtual Slides?
Whole-slide images (Virtual Slides), are a high-resolution image of physical histopathology scanned with special scanners, that produces the images in gigapixels. It allows scientists, researchers, clinical pathologists to use software to zoom for regions of interest ROIs.
Whole-slide images viewers are used in
OME (Open Microscopy Environment) is an open-source initiative aiming to produce open-source software and format standards for microscopy data. The project is started by researchers from the University of Dundee, later it gathered the attention and support from researchers, developers, & scientists from all over the world, from universities, institutes, laboratories,
OpenSlide is a C library for processing, reading whole-slide images (virtual slides). It's the engine behind many digital pathology projects open source and closed source. It provides a simple performance-focused interface for parsing and processing virtual slides images format (WSI).
OpenSlide has Python, Java, and Julia language bindings. Developers who
BioImageXD is an open-source microscopy imaging software for processing, analyzing, visualizing, and rendering multi-dimensional microscopy images.
The project was carried out by a team of researchers including microscopists, cell biologists and software engineers from the Universities of Jyväskylä and Turku in Finland, Max Planck Institute CBG in Dresden, Germany and
Cytomine is a web-based open source solution, aiming to empower whole-slide image processing, & analysis with machine learning algorithms. It's built to ease collaboration among researchers.
Cytomine is built by a group of researchers from Montefiore Institute (University of Liège, Belgium) who are developing machine learning algorithms and big data software