Automated Infrastructure for High-Throughput Acquisition of Serial Section TEM Image Volumes

Abstract

Electron microscopy (EM) has sufficient resolution to map neural circuits at the level of individual neurons and the chemical synapses between them (i.e. connectomics). However, millions of high resolution EM images (4 x 4 x 40 nm voxel) are needed to span brain volumes of sufficient size to contain circuits of interest. Therefore, high-throughput imaging at high-resolution remains a primary challenge for connectomics [1]. We present here infrastructure to greatly reduce the acquisition time for this class of EM volume, through parallelized image readout, high-speed sample motion during mosaicking, and automated exchange of TEM sample grids.