
3D-printed microscope enables computational super-resolution imaging at $1200 - vo2maxer
https://f1000researchdata.s3.amazonaws.com/manuscripts/23450/6576bc13-4d38-494d-a56a-92ef864de3c3_21294_-_brian_patton.pdf?doi=10.12688/f1000research.21294.1&numberOfBrowsableCollections=19&numberOfBrowsableInstitutionalCollections=5&numberOfBrowsableGateways=22
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kasbah
Neat, hadn't seen this. I actually work in the research group at Uni of Bath
that develops the original OpenFlexure design. If you have access to a
3d-printer and are interested in microscopy then I recommend building one. You
don't have to spend $1200. There are different versions of the design you can
choose from. Some just use the Raspberry Pi camera optics and are hand-
actuated which makes them much cheaper.

[https://openflexure.org/projects/microscope/](https://openflexure.org/projects/microscope/)

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ramraj07
This is unfortunately just sensationalist at best, trying to milk
"superresolution microscopy" with the other microscopy concepts, with this
study using the 3D printed microscope as the gimmick.

To be clear, the OpenFlexure project is quite awesome and I am planning to
build my own "garage" microscope sometime, and this design is the lead
candidate. Two things you _cannot_ skimp on in a decent microscope, however,
are a good objective and a good camera, and they both cost in the thousands at
the least.

The constant struggle with biological microscopy (and I suppose most imaging
technologies) is to try and extract the most amount of information possible
for every photon your sample gives out. This will simultaneously allow you to
observe samples without affecting them too much and get higher spatiotemporal
resolution.

The whole field of superresolution started because we thought we hit the
fundamental theoretical limits of how much resolution we can get from _any_
light microscope, even when using the cutting edge imaging technology.
Superresolution techniques tried to trick and work around the limit by adding
some extra imaging criteria (image one molecule at a time, screw with the
illumination psf, fancy fluorescent proteins, etc). If you use suboptimal
optics and then apply superresolution techniques, the image quality you get
would just be worse with superresolution in this setup than with a regular
microscope with good optics. That is actually clear in the figures in this
paper - the "superresolution" images in the paper are worse than what any
regular graduate student would get from a department confocal microscope.

Can't fault the particular study though: the entire superresolution microscopy
field was a multibillion dollar blackhole of research funds with almost
nothing to show by way of meaningful biological insight (leave alone deserving
of Nobel prizes so soon).

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dr_coffee
Building on your comment, I think that while it does help to have high quality
cameras and objective lenses, it is always worthwhile to push the limits of
how cheap we can go. There have been many nicely done papers in this vein
recently, showing for example, how cheapER cameras perform on supperresolution
microscopy setups [1]. That paper showed that the setup is able to resolve
cellular structures (actin filaments) less than 100 nm apart and measures the
standard deviation of localization of single fluorophore emmitters.

Super-resolution implies that you are imaging below the diffraction (Abbe)
limit. While the Fourier ring correlation can be used as a surrogate for
resolution (it is frequently used in both cryo-em and fluorescent microscopy)
you must define the correlation cutoff or else the measurement is meaningless.
I do not see any mention of a cutoff used in the linked paper.

I would be more convinced if they actually imaged something smaller than the
diffraction limit of their microscope, like the nuclear pore, which was
recently proposed as a standard for the field [2]. Nonetheless I am impressed
by the image quality given how un-rigid and prone to thermal drift/expansion
their microscope probably is.

[1]
[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-19981-z](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-19981-z)

[2]
[https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/582668v1](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/582668v1)

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narrator
Here's a great video presentation on the project:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0F1pBmWuU3M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0F1pBmWuU3M)

I'm very impressed with the hardware and software design of this project.

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aiscapehumanity
Beautiful, frugual sciences and accessible technics production (and
affordable) is key to opening up biosciences to more people and possibly
liberating costs to equipment making parts of biotech akin to what has become
for computing when it comes to areas such as microcontrollers and others
things (Thinking rapsberry pi and arduinos)

