Since the 1990s, Yokogawa has played a prominent role in the R&D of high-speed confocal microscopes for real-time imaging of living cells, and in 1996, launched its first product, the CSU10 confocal scanner unit. The company then released the CellVoyager TM high-throughput screening system, the CQ1 all-in-one image cytometer, the CellPathfinder cell image analysis software, and other advanced products. Yokogawa is a pioneer of live cell imaging technologies and drug discovery support systems.
In this interview, NewsMedical speaks with Kevin Jan from Yokogawa about the future of live cell imaging technologies. Using confocal microscopy, the CSU 10 enabled live imaging of cells and thick specimens through the z-axis with multipoint illumination and multipoint detection, whereas both the illumination and detection of conventional optical microscopy were planar. Also, using most of the confocal microscopes at the time, it typically took over a second to produce a single image.
That was too slow to observe the movement of living cells in real-time. The CSU10 provided scanning speeds as fast as 360 frames/second with a high signal-to-noise (S/N) ratio. Those characteristics allowed direct viewing of clear-cut, confocal images of fluorescent specimens in real-time at the eyepiece.
The confocal images captured by the CSU10 could be recorded by a video camera as live images. Those allowed the study of real-time behavior and interactions among microorganisms. The imaging quality allowe.