LP-12 Approaches to Visualization of 3D Structures Captured by a Confocal Microscope

Laser scanning confocal microscopes are capable to focus a laser beam into a layer of an investigated biological specimen, and by the gradual scanning of this layer they acquire an optical section. By consecutive scanning of all preset layers of the specimen we obtain a stack of optical sections, i.e. a 3D digital representation of the specimen [1]. In the presented study we focus on volume reconstruction of large biological tissues, i.e. tissues greater than field of view and/or thicker than maximal depth of scanning of a confocal microscope. Volume reconstruction consists of the following steps [2]: A) Specimen preparation and cutting into thin physical slices. B) Acquisition of overlapping fields of view (spatial tiles) from all physical slices. C) Horizontal merging (mosaicing) of the spatial tiles into a sub-volume representing a physical slice. D) Vertical merging of sub-volumes of successive physical slices into volume representation of the whole specimen using elastic registration. The reason for applying the elasti