An additional 120 square foot office is available to house the confocal microscope. The electron microscopy suite is located on the same floor. Clinical facilities are located across the street on the EVMS Medical Center Campus and include facilities for both inpatient and out patient surgery and follow-up care both at the Lions Sight and Hearing Center and in ophthalmologists' private offices. Confocal microscope - An ophthalmological confocal microscope manufactured by Advanced Scanning, Ltd., has been requested to permit evaluation, quantitation, and documentation of the projects proposed by our research group.
Confocal microscopy has a number of benefits when compared to standard light microscopy.
It permits resolution of discrete optical sections through cells, which allows reconstruction of the cell in three dimensions. This is crucial in revealing changes in the integrity of the epithelium and in the relationship of the various cell layers to each other in the cornea and to determine damage in other ocular structures, such as the optic nerve. The ability to determine discrete optical sections also is useful in reducing the blurring caused by light produced out of the focal plane that occurs when fluorescent probes are used. Reduction of this blurring enhances the localization of fluorescent probes, such as those labeled antibodies used for immunocytochemistry and fluorescent microbeads that will be used for determination of aqueous humor flow. Unlike other high-resolution techniques such as SEM or TEM, confocal microscopy can be performed on living cells, permitting longitudinal studies on the same subject.