SVI Support Wiki Pages

Yokogawa disk

The Yokogawa Electric Corporation devised a unique Nipkow disk system with another coaxial spinning disk containing an array of microlenses, which efficiently guides the laser beams into pinholes .

Akihiko Nakano; Spinning-disk Confocal Microscopy: A Cutting-Edge Tool for Imaging of Membrane Traffic. Cell Struct. Funct., Vol. 27, 349-355 (2002) .




(Images from this link, paragraph 5).

This page explains the principles of the microlens-enhanced Nipkow disk scanning technology.

Yokogawa disk in Huygens

A typical disk has a physical pinhole spacing of about 253 microns and pinhole radius of 25 microns (50 µm in diameter). While Yokogawa has three different CSU heads on the market, the CSU10, CSU22 and CSUX1, the pinhole size and the design are basically the same.

If you want to process images made with a Nipkow Disk Microscope containing a Yokogawa disk in the Huygens Software , you must use the Back Projected values, not the physical ones directly. The necessary values are the physical ones divided by the total magnification. You can find the values for some typical magnifications in the following table:

Magnification
Back Projected Pinhole Radius
Back Projected Pinhole Distance
100× 250 nm 2.53 µm
60× 416.7 nm 4.22 µm
40× 625 nm 6.33 µm
20× 1250 nm 12.7 µm
10× 2500 nm 25.3 µm

These values can be confirmed for any magnification just by stopping the disk and imaging the illumination pattern without any sample, as in the following image, measuring distances there, and dividing them by the total magnification of the system:

Image of a stopped CSU 22 confocal spinning disk recorded with a 60× - 1.42 NA objective, acquired by Dr. Paula Sampio, Advanced Light Microscopy Facility, University of Porto. Pixel size 138.5 nm.


See Pinhole Distance and Difficulties Calculating The Pinhole for more details.

---