The NCRR funded resource at the National Center for Microscopy and Imaging Research (NCMIR) in La Jolla, CA, houses several intermediate-high voltage electron microscopes (IVEM) that are deployed and available to the greater scientific research community for imaging biological structures. At the Korean Basic Science Institute, a new 1.25 MeV ultra-high voltage electron microscope (UHVEM) was recently commissioned for both materials science and biological imaging. The high accelerating voltages of IVEM and UHVEM instruments allows the examination of relatively thick specimens; these instruments are especially useful for deriving three-dimensional structures using electron microscopy tomography techniques. Despite the proven efficacy of such instruments, only a relative few are deployed in the world due to the prohibitive costs. Access to and utilization of such specialized imaging instruments has traditionally been impeded by the requirement of researchers to travel to the instrument site to conduct their experiments. To address this limitation, NCMIR researchers have actively explored the development and refinement of distributable software solutions for Telemicroscopy. Today several groups (both in industry and academia) are also exploring solutions for remote control of microscopes or other high-end instrumentation. NCMIR.s pioneering effort into this arena began in 1992 with the demonstration of the first system to control an electron microscope over the Internet from the SIGGraph conference in Chicago. This proof-of-concept system enabled conference attendees to interactively acquire and view images via remote control of one of the intermediate voltage electron microscopes (IVEM) at NCMIR. The efforts at SIGGraph ultimately lead to our more recent production Web-based Telemicroscopy system.

While, web-based Telemicroscopy has been effective in removing the physical barriers to the collaborative use of these instruments , the increased sophistication of the instruments themselves, and the increasing number of peripheral devices (i.e. digital detectors), it became clear that a generalized architecture was necessary to rapidly deploy and enable new Telemicroscopy based instruments and associated devices. Moreover, the development of Grid services as a standard for interoperability between computational resources has lead to a fundamental change in the architecture of the Telescience Project, and Grid projects in general. A Grid service is a specialized web service designed to function within a Grid Environment. The Generalized Telemicroscopy architecture described here extends instrument control systems from classic client-server applications to include the full functionality and interoperability of web (and grid) services.

Documentation

EM Workspace Tutorial

Publications

Molina, T., et al. (2005) A Generalized Service-Oriented Architecture for Remote Control of Scientific Imaging Instruments. Proceedings of the 1st IEEE International Conference of e-Science and Computing, pp. 550-556 (pdf)

Akiyama, T., et al.(2003) Telecontrol of Ultra-High Voltage Electron Microscope over Global IPv6 Network. Proceedings of the 2003 Symposium on Applications and the Internet Workshops (SAINT'03 Workshops), page 184 (pdf)

Takaoka, A., et al. (2000) International telemicroscopy with a 3MV ultrahigh voltage electron microscope. Ultramicroscopy. May;83(1-2):93-101.

Hadida-Hassan, M., et al. (1999) Web-based Telemicroscopy. J. Struct. Biol. 125:2/3, April/May, pp. 235-245 (pdf)

Fan, G.Y., et al. (1993) Telemicroscopy. Ultramicroscopy Dec;52(3-4):499-50

CRBS   •   NCMIR   •   The Telescience Project   •   CCDB

National Institutes
of Health (NIH)

National Center for
Research Resources
(NCRR)

Department of Health
and Human Services
(DHHS)

National Science
Foundation (NSF)

University of California
at San Diego (UCSD)

© 2003 National Center for Microscopy and Imaging Research