An Electronic Control and Image Acquisition System for Laser Scanning Microscopy

Abstract

This paper presents an electronic system that controls the entire operation of a laser scanning microscopy system through a DAQ card. Proposed system does not only create the required electro-coil driving signal peculiar to magnetically actuated micro-scanner that enables the raster-scanning movement, but also is responsible from the image acquisition part by both serially gathering the laser intensity data and using it to construct a meaningful microscopy image. Micro-scanner which is fabricated using Ni as the structural material is utilized in the system. The microscanner's slow and fast scan frequencies are measured to be 250 Hz and 1560 Hz, respectively. Model of the DAQ card used in the system is NI-6356 which has maximum 5 mA current and 10 V voltage outputs. A power amplifier circuit with LM 386 is designed and added to the system for increasing field-of-view of the micro-scanner. The operation of the proposed system is demonstrated by acquiring data and constructing images from the USAF resolution target.