IMAGE PROCESSING AND ANALYSIS IMPROVES MICROSCOPIC IMAGES CAPTURED WITH FIBER BUNDLES.

R arely will cellular biologists intentionally degrade amicroscopic image, but our group at the MicroscaleLife Sciences Center (MLSC) at the University of Washington (Seattle, WA) is doing just that. At MLSC we work together in teams of engineers, analytical chemists, and biologists to design and build single-cell analysis sys-tems, and we often find that heat, chemistry, or physical constraints prevent the use of a traditional microscope for imaging.1 Fiber optic imaging bundles provide one solution to this problem. A fiber optic imaging bundle consists of an array of opti-cal fibers arranged in a coherent bundle so that the relative position of each fiber remains constant and an image can be transmitted from one end of the bundle to the other. Imaging bundles are widely used as chemical sensors and biosensors.2 Two factors limit their use in microscopic imaging. First, each fiber effectively transmits one pixel o