Research Facillities
at The BCVC
Experimental
Facilities:
Vision
Research:
The fourth floor of the
LSU Eye Center in New Orleans (25,000 sq. ft) has the following microscopes
for vision research.
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Light microscopy: Dr.
Beuerman's lab is equipped with Nikon and Zeiss light microscopes with
light sources for white light and fluorescence microscopy using
fluorescein or rhodium filter sets for visualization of the
chromatophores.
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Electron microscopy:
The electron microscopy facility, under the direction of Dr. Beuerman, is
supported by a CORE grant from the National Eye Institute. The
facility has a Zeiss EM10CA transmission electron microscope (TEM) and a
Zeiss DSM 950 scanning electron microscope (SEM).
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Confocal microscopy:
The Eye Center has two in-vivo confocal microscopes with a CCD camera, a
high-resolution Sony Medical monitor, a Sony VP5000 videoprinter, an
Imaging Technology overlay frame grabber, and a PC with Optimas image
analysis software (Bioscan).
Genomics
Research:
DNA sequences will be obtained
at the Molecular Genetics Laboratory at the LSU Health Sciences Center
and at the Tulane University Medical Center. The laboratories have
an ABI 373A automated DNA sequencer with a second ABI 377 on order, a refrigerated
microcentrifuge, twenty PCR machines, incubators, refrigerators, digital
image analysis system, electrophoresis equipment -20 and -70 freezers,
scintillation counters and a dark room for film processing. In addition,
a full complement of GMS microarray equipment is available at Tulane University
Medical Center along with transgenomic wave machine for mutational analysis.
There is currently an expansion in genomics and computational biology in
the New Orleans Medical Complex and these facilities will continue to grow
at a rapid rate.
Tissue-Architecture Research:
Microscopes:
The Soccolofsky Microscopy Facility is equipped with a Noran real-time
laser scanning confocal microscope coupled to an SGI Indy computer for
controlling image acquisition. The LSU Biological Sciences researchers
(Silverman and Lynn) have research grade inverted and compound scopes with
phase, brightfield, and DIC optics as well as instrumentation for imaging
and cell structure research. Both transmission and scanning electron
microscopes are also located in the facility. Computer hardware and
software are available for processing and printing single digitized images
from any of the instruments. Each LSU researcher (Gleason, Lynn and
Silverman) has computer driven electrophysiological setups and image capture
systems on inverted and compound microscopes.
CAMD: The
synchrotron radiation source at LSUÌs Center for Advanced Microstructures
and Devices (CAMD) will be used for x-ray micro-tomography imaging by LSU
scientists (Butler and Kurtz). CAMD is a $40 million synchrotron
facility with a 1.2 - 1.5 GeV electron storage ring and 12 beamlines.
The facility is being upgraded with a 7.5 Tesla superconducting wiggler
to increase the photon energy and thus enable experiments on larger or
more x-ray absorbing samples.
A microtomography beamline
is under construction. The equipment was funded recently by a grant
from the Board of Regents; a postdoc is employed by CAMD to bring the system
on-line. . This will be the fourth synchrotron x-ray microtomography
beamline in the US. It benefits from recent developments in CCD
cameras, high-resolution motion control, and instrument control software.
Computational
Facilities:
Parallel
Computers
The Concurrent Computing
Laboratory (CCL) at LSU-Baton Rouge will fulfill the simulation and visualization
needs of the Center. The CCL consists of two parallel computing laboratories,
one in the Department of Physics and Astronomy and the other in the Department
of Computer Science. With $2.5 million in infrastructure enhancement
grants from the State of Louisiana, these labs have been equipped with
the following parallel machines (see Fig. 19):
Cluster
Computing
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Digital Alpha cluster - 64
Alpha processors (eighteen 500 MHz, eight 275 MHz and thirty-eight 165 MHz
processors) connected via two Gigaswitches and a fast ethernet
switch.
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PC cluster- With support from
the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR), we have constructed a
cluster of 164 PCs (733 MHz Pentium III) forming a hierarchical network
fabric with a gigabit ethernet switch and four fast-ethernet switches with
gigabit uplinks.
Visualization
Facilities:
Virtual Environment Lab
The CCL also has visualization
facilities that include five SGI workstations and an 8-processor
SGI Power Center. The group also has a virtual environment (VE) laboratory
that features an interactive and immersive ImmersaDesk for visualization.
The VE Lab has received $488k in funding from the Air Force Office of Scientific
Research and LSU. The proposed research will also be conducted in
a fully-immersive CAVE.
Microscopic data obtained
from the above facilities will be digitized for subsequent image processing
and data mining on the parallel-computing facility described below.
Image converters are either attached to the microscopes or at LSUÌs Remote
Sensing and Image Processing Laboratory (RSIPL) directed by Dr. Harlow.
The RSIPL has a cluster of 16 PCs on fast ethernet in addition to a number
of servers and workstations with extensive image processing software packages
such as ENVI and Khoros. Image-digitization facilities at the RSIPL
include: slide scanners, flatbed scanners, and large format (up to 36"
wide) scanners for image acquisition; a digital non-linear video editing
system; and digital data duplication and dissemination equipment.
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