An electronic control and image acquisition system for laser scanning microscopy

This paper presents an electronic system that controls the entire operation of a laser scanning microscopy system through a DAQ card. Proposed system does not only create the required electro-coil driving signal peculiar to magnetically actuated micro-scanner that enables the raster-scanning movement, but also is responsible from the image acquisition part by both serially gathering the laser intensity data and using it to construct a meaningful microscopy image. Micro-scanner which is fabricated using Ni as the structural material is utilized in the system. The micro-scanner's slow and fast scan frequencies are measured to be 250 Hz and 1560 Hz, respectively. Model of the DAQ card used in the system is NI-6356 which has maximum 5 mA current and 10 V voltage outputs. A power amplifier circuit with LM 386 is designed and added to the system for increasing field-of-view of the micro-scanner. The operation of the proposed system is demonstrated by acquiring data and constructing images from the USAF resolution target.