CDMMS Quarterly Gathering

Talk by W. Gray Jerome and Dinner

At Union College

Thursday June 3 at 5:30 PM –7:30 PM

Dinner at 5:30 PM

Talk begins at 6:30 PM

Members $10

Non-members $15

Students free

Please contact Rose Neander to register neander@ge.com

W. Gray (Jay) Jerome, Ph.D. is Associate Professor at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, TN. An MSA Past-President, Jay has been long involved in biological electron and light microscopy, and is well known for his lectures on confocal light microscopy and quantitation of biological structures.

Basic Digital Imaging and Image Formats

Most microscopy is now digital image based yet many microscopists do not fully understand basic digital image concepts. This talk covers, in a general, easy to follow manner, the basics of digital imaging in order to provide the microscopist with sufficient information to avoid common pitfalls. The field of "scientific" digital imaging is only a small subset of digital imaging. There are lots of things you can do in digital imaging that you should not do in scientific imaging because it destroys the integrity of your data; the image. Unfortunately, with modern digital imaging it is far too easy to inadvertently alter the image without even knowing that you have done so. In this talk, we review the basics of a digital image and discuss how to match the microscope parameters and image capture parameters in order to maximize image fidelity. We will also discuss post image processing and how these can affect the image data. Finally, the basics of image formats (JPEG,

TIFF) are critical but not always understood, so we include a discussion of the appropriate uses of these formats. The image information is the data and not understanding basic "scientific" digital imaging can lead to accumulation of artifactual errors.