Pascal Fua: FastScan : Scanning Electron Microscopy
© 2012 EPFL
The excellence of the research performed at EPFL has once again been recognized at an international level. Pascal Fua has received a ERC Proof of Concept-2012 from the European Research Council (ERC).
FastScan : Fast, Targetted, High-Throughput Scanning Electron Microscopy
This project aims at producing industrial-grade software from newly developed algorithms to greatly increase the throughput of scanning electron microscopes and, thus, to transform the way they are used to image 3D samples. To this end, we will integrate into the standard scanning software automated image-based recognition techniques to focus imaging resources on regions of interest while ignoring others. We expect this to speed up the acquisition by a factor 10 and to increase the volume sizes that can be imaged. Given the scientific and industrial importance of Electron Microscopy, we believe there is a substantial market for such improvements and we plan to demonstrate it.Preliminary experiments have shown that the approach we propose can indeed reduce imaging time by a factor 10 at almost no information loss. The goal of this project will be to turn the insights we have gained, and are now patenting, into a software plug-in that can be sold along with Zeiss microscopes and their attendant software. Our target customers will initially be neuro-scientists both in academia and industry. However, the techniques we propose will also be of use in other fields where Electron Microscopy plays a critical role, such as Material Sciences and Electronic Circuit Design.
Max ERC PoC funding: 0.15 million Euros
Duration: 12 months
Host institution: EPFL
Project acronym: FASTSCAN