Patent ID: 9575304
Date: 2017-02-21
CPC Classifications: G01N,G02B

Claim:
1. A scanning microscope for obtaining a final contiguous colour image of at least a portion of a specimen, the microscope comprising: a) an illumination system to illuminate a part of the specimen being scanned; b) at least one lens that focuses light from the specimen onto a two dimensional sensor array, the specimen mounted on a support that is movable relative to the two dimensional sensor array; c) the two dimensional sensor array having a plurality of rows and columns, and having a colour filter array, the colour filter array that is one selected from the group of: d) the sensor array having a shutter, the shutter synchronized to open, acquire a two dimensional image frame of the specimen and close with the motion of the specimen relative to each line of the sensor array each time that an optical image of the specimen has moved a distance that is equal to the distance between adjacent rows of the sensor array, the sensor array acquiring image frames when the shutter is open and data for the image frames acquired being transferred to a frame capture device when the shutter is closed, the sensor array acquiring multiple image frames of the specimen in one or more image strips, each image frame comprising a plurality of adjacent lines of the sensor array and immediately adjacent image frames each shifted from one another by one line of the sensor array, the sensor array acquiring a two dimensional image frame of the specimen each time that the shutter opens and closes; e) each image strip having a width equal to a width respectively of the colour filter array, the colour filter array having a length and width corresponding to the length and width respectively of the sensor array; f) a processor programmed: