We are pleased to announce that Prof. Richard Levenson will be joining us in Cairns this August for the annual Pathology Horizons Conference.
The title of Prof. Levenson’s talk is “Path, Present and Future: Novel Microscopies” .
According to Prof. Levenson how microscopes work in actual clinical pathology has not changed materially in well over a century. Recently, however, a number of new approaches are being developed, some of which will eventually find their way into the mainstream. One method, which Prof. Levenson will look at in detail is Microscopy with Ultraviolet Surface Excitation (MUSE). MUSE is a rapid approach for obtaining high-resolution, diagnostic quality histological images from unsectioned thick tissue specimens, replacing the need for slide preparation and the attendant extensive tissue processing and thin physical sectioning. MUSE is notable for its optical and mechanical simplicity. Excitation of tissue surfaces with 280-nm UV excitation excites a wide range of exogenous dyes with very large Stokes shifts. The resulting images can be captured using ordinary microscopic optics and standard CMOS or CCD cameras.
Preparing a sample for MUSE imaging can be performed in around a minute. With appropriate stage travel, extended fields of view can be captured from whole organs with microscopic detail. This non-destructive process leaves the sample intact for subsequent downstream molecular or genetic analysis.
In addition, images can include shading and depth cues that reveal surface profiles important in understanding the three-dimensional organization of complex specimens. This inexpensive, rapid and slide-free, sample-sparing method has potential to replace frozen sections, and may have other applications in both high and low resource settings.
Here’s a snippet of Prof. Levenson speaking about the ground breaking topic of MUSE.
Join us for Pathology Horizons 2017 in Cairns to hear more.