Industry News: The iPad Imaging App Labscope - Simple. Mobile. Connected.

In a scientific and medical environment, working with microscopes is an everyday part of laboratory activities. There are a wide variety of different tasks and questions which microscopes are used here to answer, ranging from seemingly simple and everyday routine jobs to experimental questions of a scientific nature. In this context, taking microscopic photos for documentation purposes in quality management and editing them for scientific publications are both becoming increasingly important.

If you want to create the best possible microscopic image and document it using software, the systems need to be set up exactly right. Often laboratory employees do not have much time to study and learn about the microscope and the different options and algorithms available in an image processing application. This is where Labscope, the iPad imaging app from ZEISS, comes to the rescue.

Simple
The goal of this new image acquisition and processing software is simple installation, operation, and further use of the create images. The app communicates with the ZEISS Axiocam ERc 5s camera. The iPad accesses the microscope camera via an external router. The user can view the live image of the microscope in HD directly on the iPad and take photos with a resolution of 5 megapixels. The images or videos are easy to edit and integrate into report templates.

The images including all metadata and a separate annotation layer can be saved in the ZEN-compatible .czi file format. The space-saving .jpg format can also be used to save images. The recorded images are easy to edit, such as adding measuring bars, pointing to specific regions of the images using arrows, or adding explanatory text.

Mobile
Up until now, microscope users were tied to their devices and laboratory. Now it is possible to monitor experiments from outside the lab, by wirelessly connecting to the microscope, regardless of where the user is located.

Sharing the images recorded via e-mail, social media, or cloud services, for example to discuss the results with colleagues at other labs and institutes, is as easy as the push of a button.

Connected
Connectivity is an aspect that plays an important role in laboratory work and increasingly in an educational setting as well. The app meets the requirements of these fields with two different connection options. For example, multiple users can use iPads to access a single microscope in order to view the same image. This makes it easier to discuss and work with the microscopic images in an educational setting. Furthermore, the instructor has an overview of all the connected microscopes in the room and can view each microscope's images. This allows the instructor to evaluate the students' images, provide assistance if needed, and choose a selection of images to display to all participants via a projector or Apple TV.

The ZEISS iPad imaging app Labscope is available for free from the Apple App Store.