COMPUTER CONTROL FOR A GALVANOMETER SCANNER IN A CONFOCAL SCANNING LASER MICROSCOPE

A digital control has been developed for a galvanometer scanner used i n a confocal scanning laser microscope. The galvanometer scanner utili zes a microprocessor-controlled scan control unit, able to produce rep etitive analog waveforms and digital control signals, and to record an alog and digital signals. The scan control unit outputs a sawtooth wav eform to the galvanometer, records the position signal from the positi on sensor in the galvanometer, and uses this information to calculate the timing needed to trigger the reading of 1024x1024 equally spaced p ixels in the specimen. The galvanometer may be statically positioned a t an arbitrarily chosen pixel, thereby allowing recording of data from a point within the microscope specimen for an arbitrary length of tim e. This makes it possible to record spectral information or to measure fluorescent lifetimes at a single point.