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Dear Microscopists-

Our group has begun using a parallel microscope system to study the movement of fluorescent beads on cells, or in biofilms, mucus, other biological fluids.  We then track the bead movements and generate MSD (mean squared displacement) curves for each bead.  Each 1 minute video at 60 FPS takes up about a gigabyte of data storage.  Meanwhile the tracks (position/ time) might take several kB for each bead.  We can take 12 videos simultaneously, so potentially we are generating 12 gB/minute, a terabyte every hour and 25 minutes!

We believe that taking an image at the beginning of tracking, and keeping the tracking records would be sufficient for us to troubleshoot our data, since we can't possibly store the original videos.  This would let us know where the beads were at the beginning of the video (on the nucleus?  On the glass?) Signatures of "lost beads" or "stuck beads" are easily identified in control experiments.

We are also considering other intermediate data reduction-potentially saving parts of the videos throughout the timecourse.  But this is going to be difficult to implement, and keep track of.  Moreover, the reduction is not nearly as high as taking one frame and keeping the tracking results.

What is the community's understanding of the requirements for storing "original" data?  Do we need to keep full videos and spend all our budget on hard drives, or will just the position/time data and an index frame be enough?

What other solutions does your group use?

Thanks very much!

Tim O'Brien
Computer Integrated Systems for Microscopy and Manipulation
UNC Chapel Hill, North Carolina