• LEMOLish: Light Sheet Microscopy at your fingertips!

    An open-source LEGO®-based lightsheet device for scientific imaging of cleared organs

  • The Project

    LEMOLish is a motorized LEGO®-based light sheet microscope built to acquire scientific 3D images from centimeter-sized optically cleared biological samples. The system is open source, versatile, and costs about a hundred times less than existing custom/commercial solutions! This website summarizes the concepts of the project and provides access to the blueprint material (still under construction but fully available soon).

    broken image

    What's the catch?

    LEMOLish relies on an innovative and compact optical design to create an array of thin light sheets without complex optical alignment. Combined with low noise affordable industrial CMOS cameras, the resulting image quality reaches scientific grade. No expensive medium-corrected objective lenses are required to acquire Z-stacks through the sample chamber thanks to the automated repositioning of the light sheet at the image plane. The images can be taken simultaneously from two detection sides (two cameras needed) and can be easily recombined so as to avoid typical deep-imaging image degradation. Altogether, the system achieves "stripe-free" 3D imaging at low cost and without tedious optical adjustments, expensive parts or complex image post-processing.

    broken image

    How does it work?

    The control of the moving parts at micro-metric resolution is entirely performed by LEGO bricks and motorized LEGO MINDSTORM EV3 components. To trigger up to two lasers (dual channel imaging) and two cameras (dual side imaging), a simple electronic board with external power supply has been designed. The sample is sitting inside a fully independent quartz/ glass chamber and it can be rotated by a pair of communicating magnets. Inexpensive laser diodes and an innovative combination of glass capillaries and a single cylindrical lens enables to create a thin array of light sheets. A custom software is provided to drive the microscope (directly from the LEGO® EV3 brick) and to combine the image stacks taken from both detection sides (Matlab executable). It is also possible to fuse 180 (+/-30) degree views (achieved with sample rotation) so as to maintain the image quality throughout the sample in the orthogonal direction (illumination sides).

     

    See all these functional parts working together

    Open the box

  • LEMOLish in action

    Top view of LEMOLish during image acquisition: a 532nm laser lightsheet scanned through 5cm Glass chamber holding a large cleared specimen (>4cm chicken embryo)

     

  • Software

    The software to control the LEMOLISH and combine image stacks acquired during dual camera/view/channels experiments

  • Connect With Us (coming soon)

    broken image
    broken image
  • License

    LEGO-based Motorized Lightsheet Microscope


    LEMOLISH by Julien Colombelli, Sébastien Tosi is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
    Based on a work at https://legolish.org/.
    Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at https://github.com/adm-irb.