This subproject is one of many research subprojects utilizing the resources provided by a Center grant funded by NIH/NCRR. Primary support for the subproject and the subproject's principal investigator may have been provided by other sources, including other NIH sources. The Total Cost listed for the subproject likely represents the estimated amount of Center infrastructure utilized by the subproject, not direct funding provided by the NCRR grant to the subproject or subproject staff. GENERALIZED INSTRUMENT CONTROL AND AUTOMATION SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT This general objective of this subproject is to enhance our ability to acquire data from light and electron microscopes (LM/EM) at the NCMIR facility and at our allied resources, by developing, refining and applying software technologies to integrate instrumentation, computing and informatics technologies. More specifically, we aim to increase data acquisition and analysis throughput (and increase the quality and extent of information logged about data collection and instrument configuration) by leveraging upon and expanding our scalable generalized telemicroscopy system (Molina et al., 2005). This system is designed to integrate, organize and unify the control of imaging instruments and accessories (detectors, stages, etc.) and securely couple their use to advanced cyberinfrastructure, including resources for data management and storage, high-performance computing and informatics. This software architecture is being extended to integrate instruments of unique value to the mesoscale imaging aims of the Center, in particular the FEI Titan STEM/TEM. Data-driven and computationally enhanced automation schemes were developed, along with supporting services, to organize and coordinate the increasingly large data volumes delivered from each instrument. Unifying interfaces were also developed to simplify how manual, automated, basic and advanced features are presented to the biomedical researcher. The steps necessary to achieve these goals leverage, extend and refine the GTS to integrate key multimodal imaging instruments (local and remote) and enable advanced control and automation for high-throughput mesoscale imaging. This increases our data handling performance and refines session state reporting through improvements to the capabilities of the GTS. We continued to refine a software prototyping environment to streamline, promote and simplify the development of novel instrument-based applications, including automation and data-driven feedback schemes.
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