Patent ID: 8687858

Claim:
A method for producing thin sections of a sample by cutting the thin sections from the sample by a microtome, comprising: repeatedly cutting in a teach-in phase the sample for generating a plurality of thin sections and corresponding sample cutting surfaces on the sample; acquiring in the teach-in phase by a camera images of said corresponding sample cutting surface on the sample; evaluating in the teach-in phase subjectively by a user whether the quality of the thin sections are good or poor and correlating the respective images of the sample cutting surfaces to the respective thin sections evaluated good or poor; determining in the teach-in phase by an image processing program characteristic values of the images of the sample cutting surfaces acquired by the camera and correlating these characteristic values to the respective thin sections evaluated good or poor for identifying correlating limit values for those characteristic values correlating to sufficiently good section quality; storing the limit values in an evaluation device; and automatically evaluating in a thin section production phase images of the sample cutting surfaces by the evaluation device for determining the characteristic values of the sample cutting surfaces and comparing these to the limit values to determine whether the respective thin sections of the sample are accepted or not accepted.