MPScope 2.0: A Computer System for Two-Photon Laser Scanning Microscopy with Concurrent Plasma-Mediated Ablation and Electrophysiology

Excerpt

The MPScope [1] freeware package is a comprehensive suite of programs that run under the Microsoft Windows operating system and are designed as control and analysis elements for two-photon laser scanning microscopy (TPLSM) and various extensions. MPScope consists of MPScan, the acquisition software, MPView, the analysis program, and MPFile, a utility to open MPScope data files in user-written applications. MPScope was designed from the outset as a turn-key, stand-alone, easy-to-use software system with flexible hardware options aimed at concurrent functional imaging, (e.g., calcium fluorescence), and electrophysiology experiments. However, the versatility of MPScope is such that it can be used in many different types of experiments including in vivo cortical blood flow imaging and two-photon plasma-mediated ablation automated histology [2]. The usefulness of MPScope stems mostly from leveraging advanced software technologies available on the Windows platform.

Over 50 laboratories have registered for either using MPScope or for downloading its source code as of summer 2008. Many users run MPScope on custom-made two-photon laser scanning microscopes designed for in vivo imaging, such as the one described by Tsai and Kleinfeld [3] in Chapter 3, while others have successfully adapted MPScope to control multiphoton systems based on commercial microscopes. The widening use of MPScope had, unfortunately, the unforeseen side effect of spurring a multitude of disparate hardware configurations, some very specific to a given laboratory, with the concomitant burden of supporting them in successive releases of MPScope. To alleviate this situation for future users of MPScope, we have overhauled MPScope and formed a presumably stable baseline configuration.