Patent ID: 8896918

Claim:
An instrument for scanning at least a portion of a large specimen, said instrument comprising an imaging system having an optical train to focus light from the specimen onto a two dimensional detector array, said detector array being part of the optical train, said specimen being supported on a specimen holder, said holder being movable relative to said detector array in a direction perpendicular to an edge dimension of said detector array and perpendicular to an optical train of the instrument, said specimen moving with said holder, said detector array being configured to receive data from said specimen through said imaging system when a shutter of said detector array is open and to pass data to a processor when said shutter is closed, said shutter being controllable by a controller to open and close as said holder moves relative to said detector array and said optical train, said detector array having N lines a distance X apart, said stage and said specimen being movable relative to said detector array by successive distances of MX on said detector array and corresponding successive distances of MY on said specimen, said shutter being controllable by a controller to open briefly and to close within each incremental distance MX said detector array moves relative to said specimen, said shutter being controllable to repeatedly open and close numerous times for each image strip taken of said specimen, there being a sufficient number of image strips taken to enable said specimen to be at least partially scanned so that each part of said specimen being scanned is exposed to said detector array N/M times resulting in N/M overlapping area images being taken for each part of said specimen being scanned, said processor being programmed to add together data for all N/M exposures for each line in the image strip for each part of said specimen being scanned and to assemble the resulting image strips for all parts of the specimen being scanned in order to produce a contiguous image of said portion of said specimen being scanned, where N is the number of lines in said detector array and is greater than 1, X is the distance between the lines of the detector array, Y is a distance on the specimen corresponding to the distance X on the detector array and M is a positive integer.