Organ Vision

Organoids are 3D organ-like structures constructed in vitro from primary tissues, adult stem cells, embryonic stem cells or human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) and exhibit key aspects of the in vivo function of the native organ. The mechanistic understanding of tissue maintenance, injury and repair derived from studying organoids holds an unfulfilled promise for the development of personalized medicine and new drug discovery. OrganVision’s multi-disciplinary technology solution will face this precise challenge and help accelerate organoid research toward better disease understanding, therapy design and knowledge discovery.

nanoRIP

nanoRIP is a novel technique for nanoscopy that will provide an isotropic resolution of 80 nm by exploiting the scattering of light between organelles inside the cellular structure. Through innovative instrumentation and computational algorithms, this information is used to estimate the 3D refractive index of the sample, setting a new paradigm in nanoscopy.

3d-nanoMorph

Label-free optical nanoscopy, free from photobleaching and photochemical toxicity of fluorescence labels and yielding 3D morphological resolution of <50 nm, is the future of live cell imaging. 3D-nanoMorph breaks the diffraction barrier and shifts the paradigm in label-free nanoscopy, providing isotropic 3D resolution of <50 nm. To achieve this, 3D-nanoMorph performs non-linear inverse scattering for the first time in nanoscopy and decodes scattering between sub-cellular structures (organelles).

Speckle MUSICAL

The proposed research is to integrate MUSICAL with chip-based nanoscopy system for completely bypassing the need of fluorescence blinking and consequently avoiding problems of photo-chemical toxicity without compromising spatio-temporal resolution. This innovation is possible because MUSICAL uses fluctuations of intensity, howsoever induced (blinking or otherwise), for generating super-resolved images. Complementary to this, waveguide chip made of high-refractive index material (n = 2) generates dynamically varying speckle-like illumination patterns with spatial frequencies higher than what can be achieved using far-field diffraction limited optics. This illumination will induce fluorescence intensity fluctuations needed by MUSICAL. The innovation will result into controlled system-based imaging, instead of less-controllable blinking-based imaging. Further, it will allow significantly large field-of-view (~mm2) with resolution of (150 - 200 nm) using low NA (0.2) collection objective lens because the spatial frequencies of chip based illumination remain the same irrespective of the collection optics .

VirtualStain

VirtualStain is an ambitious project that could have a far-reaching impact on the way we analyse and interpret tissue- and cell-images. This large, collaborative effort, involving four departments from three different faculties, is part of the UiT Tematiske satsninger, a funding program intended to encourage innovative interdepartmental and interdisciplinary projects.

NanoPath

We will create an optical imaging solution for pathology that can be fitted to existing optical microscopes, by exploiting novel chip-based illumination and a super-resolution software algorithm. The proposed solution will instantly convert low-resolution optical microscopy to high-resolution imaging solution (resolution up to 50 nm), while retaining high-throughput (imaging speed) and cost-levels that allows large-scale implementation of the proposed technique within the pathologists. 

Nano-Chip

In the Nano-Chip project, we propose to enhance the penetration of our chip-based nanoscopy platform towards pathology and clinical application by addressing the key-pain points relevant for this market, i.e. a) high-throughput and b) development of multi-modality imaging platform. This is the foundation of our long-term vision: “widespread usage of affordable, multi-modality and high-throughput chip-based nanoscopes”.

Nanomotion

Nanomotion is a project that merges AI with nanoscopy. It aims to study the motion of vesicles at a nanoscale using classification algorithms based on CNN.

Auto Threshold MUSICAL

MUSICAL requires a threshold parameter that is provided by the user heuristically. Using a pattern recognition approach, the threshold can now be determined by Auto Threshold MUSICAL algorithm automatically. This makes MUSICAL more user-friendly and easy to use.

The link to Auto Threshold MUSICAL and a new nanoscopy dataset with results of autothreshold MUSICAL will be made available here after the publication of the results. This result is an outcome of the master thesis project of Sebastian Acuna.

Live cell MUSICAL

MUSICAL is a live cell friendly fluorescence nanoscopy technique supporting resolution upto 35 nm. Use your widefield microscope to obtain super-resolved image streams of live cells.

The salient properties of MUSICAL are:

  1. Requires low power in comparison to most super-resolution techniques, therefore it is less phototoxic and is especially well-suited for live cells.
  2. Requires very few image frames (50 – 200 are sufficient in most cases), therefore suitable for dynamic systems such as live cells.
  3. Compatible with any dye or fluorescent protein in theory. Tested on Alexa dyes, GFP, RFP, YFP, CMP, SirTubulin, SirActin, MitoTracker dyes, etc.
  4. Compatible with dense or sparse samples and uses natural fluctuations in fluorescent intensity. Tested for cells and tissues without using any special imaging buffer (i.e. redox solutions).
  5. Tested on a variety of cameras, objective lenses (0.4 NA 20X to 1.49NA 100X oil immersion), and multi-channel acquisitions (4 channels so far).
  6. Works with TIRF and epifluorescence x-y-t image stacks.

It’s available in an ImageJ repository as an easy-to-install and easy-to-use plugin.