| Summary: | Microscopic imaging in the biomedical sciences allows for detailed study of the structure and function of normal and abnormal (i.e., diseased) states of cells and tissues. The expression patterns of proteins and/or physiological parameters within these specimens can be related to disease progression and prognosis, and are often heterogeneously spread throughout the entire specimen. With conventional microscopy, a large number of individual image ‘tiles’ must be captured and subsequently combined into a mosaic of the entire specimen. This has the potential to introduce artefacts at the image seams, as well as introducing non-uniform illumination of the entire specimen.
A further limitation often encountered in biomedical fluorescence microscopy is the high background due to the autofluorescence (AF) of endogenous compounds within cells and tissues.
Often, AF can prevent the detection and/or accurate quantification in fluorescently- labelled tissues and, in general, can reduce the reliability of results obtained from such specimens. AF spectra are relatively broad and so can be present across a large number of image spectral channels. The intensity of AF also increases as the excitation wavelength is decreased, causing increasing amounts of autofluorescence when exciting in the blue and near-UV range of the
spectrum (400 - 500 nm).
This thesis reports the development of hyperspectral, fluorescence and brightfield imaging of entire, paraffin-embedded, formalin-fixed (PEFF) tissue slides using a prototype confocal scanner with a large field of view (FOV). This technology addresses the challenges of imaging large tissue sections through the use of a telecentric f-theta laser scan lens thus allowing an entire microscope slide (22x70 mm) to be imaged in a single scan at resolution equivalent to a 10x microscope objective. The development and optimization of brightfield and single-channel fluorescence imaging modes are discussed in the first half of this thesis, while the second half and appendices concentrate on the spectral properties of the system and removal of AF from PEFF tissue sections. The hyperspectral imaging mode designed for this system allows the fluorescence emission spectrum of each image pixel to be sampled at 6.7 nm/channel over a spectral range of 500-700 nm. This results in the ability to separate distinct fluorescence signatures from each other, and enables quantification even in situations where the AF completely masks the signal from the applied labels.
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