• Imaris is the best visualization tool for extremely large data sets

Dr. Eric Scarfone received his PhD in Neurosciences from the Université des Sciences et techniques du Languedoc, Montpellier, France. He completed his first post-doctoral research with Professor Ake Flock at the Department of Physiology, Karolinska Intitute, Stockholm, Sweden. Since 1991 Eric works for Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS). In 2005 he returned to Stockholm, where he joined the group of Professor Mats Ulfendahl. He and his colleagues work with the neurosensory system of the inner ear at the Center for Hearing and Communication Research, Karolinska Institute.

His research focuses on the interplay between different cellular components of the inner ear while the organ is at rest and when it is receiving sound stimuli. Together with his colleague, Professor Mats Ulfendahl, they have developed an ex-vivo organotypic preparation that is stained with vital fluorescent dyes and imaged using confocal or multiphoton laser scanning microscopy.

The image on the right shows a 3D reconstruction of the inner ear, created with Imaris.

Dr. Scarfone says: “Making sense of the cochlea structures and understanding motion patterns becomes extremely complex, since the cochlea is a tilted spiral where the cells that generate the auditory signal are arranged radially. Imaris is the best visualization tool to solve this problem. The data stack once loaded in surpass can be considered as an "in silico" piece of tissue that can be re-oriented and re-sectioned at will. Perfectly aligned sections can be made; these sections will be identical for several time points, which allow precise measurements of motion patterns.”

He also says: “Never before I have experienced such a smoothly interactive 3D rendering of extremely large data stacks.”