Short courses will be offered on Sunday, July 12th in the Georgia World Congress Center. Questions about course content can be addressed to the instructors, whose Email addresses are listed below. The courses are open only to meeting registrants. Course fees include notes and handouts, as well as coffee breaks, but not lunch. Some courses have limited enrollment; they will be filled on a first-come, first-served basis. (You can register Sunday morning at the meeting, but only as course capacity allows, and at the higher on-site fees.)

To reserve a place, use the Advanced Registration Form .

Course 98-01: Basic Transmission Electron Microscopy for Materials Science
Full Day
Instructors:
Stuart McKernan,
CIE Microscopy Facility, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, Email: stuartm@tc.umn.edu;
John Bruley, IBM Analytical Services,
East Fishkill, NY
Email: bruley@us.ibm.com

This course provides a non-mathematical description of the basic principles of transmission and analytical electron microscopy for materials science. Images provide microstructural detail from micron size to atomic resolution. Electron diffraction allows crystallographic analysis from microcrystalline regions. EDX and EELS spectrometry provide elemental, and bonding information at nanometer resolution. The course will be directed towards materials scientists, advanced technicians and technical managers who are required to use or interpret data taken from the TEM. Copies of the course text ÒTransmission Electron MicroscopyÓ by Williams and Carter will be available for sale to participants at the discounted exhibition rate, or you can bring your own copy.

The chemistry, equipment and protocols necessary to tag primary antibodies, peptides or nucleic acids with colloidal gold and NanogoldTM will be covered in this practical course. Tips on silver enhancement of small gold particles will be covered. Optimal use gold probes for immunocytochemistry, dual labeling, and in situ hybridization for both electron and light microscopy applications will be reviewed. The use of a new combined fluorescent-and-gold probe, gold-lipid membrane label, and other new gold probes will also be covered.

This course will discuss the various strategies needed for producing digital data that is suitable for publication. We will discuss how to best acquire the digital image for a given sample. Noise removal and resolution issues will be discussed in detail. We will examine what the current best technologies for archiving the image data are and what image formats and standards we should adopt. We will examine imaging printing in detail. We will emphasize several issues that must be understood in order to produce high quality images every time on any printer (the most critical being the gamma correction). There will be a strong emphasis placed on the most affordable solutions available regardless of platform or operating system. We will discuss the major pros and cons of moving to a more digital approach.

Increasingly, silver halide-based photographic processes are being replaced by digital image acquisition, processing and printing. The purpose of this workshop is to describe the components of the digital darkroom. Specific topics to be addressed will include: 1) digital camera; 2) flatbed and slide scanner; 3) image processing software to adjust image brightness, contrast and color and to make publication quality figures; 4) digital printers to make paper prints, slides and transparencies; and 5) storage formats for long-term archiving of image data. The workshop will include hands-on equipment demonstrations and participation by relevant vendors.

This short course will address microwave-assisted rapid tissue processing and digital imaging as practical choices in todayÕs laboratories to meet the challenges of cost containment and improved throughput. Proven microwave protocols, which provide significant time savings compared to routine processing, will be demonstrated for decalcification, histopathology and electron microscopy and the results shown. The system integration approach to digital image acquisition and printing will be demonstrated. This course is intended to provide realistic answers and new applications using microwave technology and digital imaging for tomorrowÕs problems.

The capabilities of classical and electronically-enhanced polarized light microscopy (PLM) will be critically reviewed and compared. Properly used, classical PLM offers a Òsixth senseÓ to a light microscopist. Used to enhance specific observations in either biology or materials science, traditional PLM is rapid and easily applied within its technological (and the human brainÕs) limits. However, for overall proficiency in particle identification, PLM has depended on extensive individual training and experience, during which the userÕs brain is calibrated and reference images are stored. Electronically-enhanced PLM, while not replacing the traditional methods, extends them by increasing sensitivity, allowing rapid field-wide quantitative measurements, and augmenting human vision with image capture/processing techniques. This course will cover the fundamental features of polarized light microscopy, how these are used in biology and materials science and how the traditional capabilities are supplemented and extended by novel electro-optical devices, algorithms to compute specimen birefringence, and digital image capture/processing capabilities.

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