Software

TILLvisION - Features

TILLvisION is a complete package for aquisition and analysis of all types of imaging data. It is a Plug and Play solution for all types of TILL products.

Experiment Setup

• convenient Protocol Editor for creating and changing acquisition protocols
• no limitation on the number of selected wavelengths
• digital output and input to control other devices
• get faster through binning and skipping
• reduce memory requirements and enhance speed by area of interest (AOI) selection
• preparation of several different acquisition protocols before the experiments

Acquisition

• sophisticated system benchmarking to fulfill timing requirements
• intelligent acquisition to memory or directly to disk (depending on timing requirements)
• guaranteed timing generated by OS independent Imaging System Controller (ISC)
• 29 full frames / second with 30 ms exposure time (efficiency of 87% due to overlapped exposure and transfer)
• control of external devices by TTL pulses
• "wait for trigger" option
• online image / ratio / kinetic (number is only limited by desktop size)
• setting of event markers during experiment

Analysis

• advanced ratio / calcium calculation (e.g. dark image subtraction, adaptive background correction)
• different shapes of ROIs available (rectangular, polygon, line, arbitrary)
• kinetics calculation and simple data export
• pseudo color display, very flexible image display scaling
• live mode with optional autoscale
• shading correction

Data Import and Export

• common data exchange via Clipboard
• export of kinetics to Excel and IGOR (more on request)
• user customizable macros provided
• user programmable interface to image data
• reads and writes 16 bit TIFF, 8 or 24 bit BMP
• export of image sequences in avi and quicktime format

General Image Processing

• includes almost any common image filter (median, average, Gaussian, ..)
• user definable filter kernels (including kernel size)
• wide range of image mathematics (add, subtract, multiply, divide, logical combination, ...)
• object analysis and about one hundred predefined measurements (area, center of gravity, roundness, ...)
• pattern matching (searching for similar objects)
• histograms and line profiles

Memory Management and Object Design

• transparently handles big images on disk
• all TILLvisION objects (images, palettes, histograms, ...) may have up to five independent dimensions
• most functions applicable to any object (independent of data type and dimensions)

Extensibility and Automation

• Built-in Basic Interpreter
• Basic Macros extensible by DLL interface
• Programmable by standard Microsoft Automation Interface
• TILLvisION document can keep Excel sheets or Word documents together with image data, palettes, etc.

Supported equipment

• all TILL IMAGO CCD cameras (VGA, SVGA, QE)
• PCO Sensicam EM
• ANDOR cameras: 885
• QImaging Retiga 2000RV
• light sources: Polychrome 2, 4, 5 and 5000
• microscopes (Version 4.5 and above): iMIC (2000 series) focus, xy-stage, Filter sliders
• Motorized stages: ASI 2000K, Luigs & Neumann SM5-controlled stages