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Ioana,

Maybe someone can give an instant answer, but when you say high
resolution could you be more specific? I am not even going to address
the issue of resolution when imaging through 100 um, but at a spacing
of 1 um per frame at 0.5 um xy resolution the memory required for
even 8-bit data of a 1 mm cube will be about 2 Gigabytes. This is
increased somewhat less than a thousand times if you really want to
do 10 mm by 10 mm diameter. So, uncompressed  this is about a
terabyte! With compression, you can certainly get the datasize down
to fit on a common 120 Gigabyte drive. If you want to use a "movie"
format for displaying your data there are any number of programs
available for that, but for any 3-D rendering of that large a data
set, I think you will need to consider your local mainframe or at
minimum a 64 bit processor and operating system (e.g. Unix of the
right flavor) if you don't want to wait for a very very long time. I
have never been challenged with this particular problem, but IDL from
Research Systems (now owned by Kodak) might be a place to start.

http://www.rsinc.com/

I have used it on everything from high powered Unix systems to PCs
and G4 Macs. To automate there maybe a little scripting required for
your specific application but I have used it with confocal stacks in
the past and the coding was very simple.

Programs that run on high end SGI workstations might also be worth
considering. Maybe someone can comment on the Imaris product line
from Bitplane and similar products:

http://www.bitplane.com/

I am interested in what you find out. Good luck.

Mario

>Search the CONFOCAL archive at
>http://listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu/cgi-bin/wa?S1=confocal
>
>Does anybody know about an automated program to combine multiple
>physical sections (say 100 micron thick) of the same sample (say 10 mm
>in diameter and 10 mm long)  to create a single 3D object (10 mm in
>diameter and 10 mm long). Each section is imaged with confocal
>microscopy with high resolution, so the whole 3D object is rendered
>with the same high resolution.
>
>Thanks in advance.
>I. Coman


--
_________________________________________________________________
Mario M. Moronne, Ph.D.
NanoMed Technologies
ph (510) 528-2400
FAX (510) 528-8076
1561 Posen Ave
Berkeley, CA
94706

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