Quality Control of Fluorescence Imaging Systems A New Tool for Performance Assessment and Monitoring

Context orescence imaging microscopy, national metrology institutes [3], microscope manufacturers [4], and more recently core facilities [5] have gotten involved in identifying, manufacturing and/or testing different tools, both hardware and software, to assess the numerous aspects of fluorescence microscopes. On the one hand, for the core facilities, it has become obvious that quality control of fluorescence microscopes is important, as they provide a charged service to microscope end users. In this sense, they have to assure, up to a certain level, the performances of their microscopes. Quickly identifying and solving microscope issues is therefore essential in order to prevent the acquisition of corrupted data and to minimize the machine downtime. That is why core facilities usually spend tens of thousands euros per year for the maintenance of their systems. On the other hand, for the microscope manufacturers, maintenance is not as effective as it could be for two main reasons. First, in average, one intervention of the maintenance service over two is not justified, as it is based on a wrong (human misinterpretation) in situ diagnosis of the system while it performs correctly. Second, when the system is faulty, the identification and fixation of the problem can require several interventions. Knowing in advance what the microscope issue is allows optimizing the maintenance, if it is necessary. This would reduce the maintenance time and increase the technician availability for others systems/facilities. For both these actors, a win-win opportunity could arise if an evaluation and monitoring tool, accepted from both sides, Although performance evaluation and quality control of fluorescence microscopes is a topic that appeared more than fifteen years ago in academic laboratories [1] and national regulatory agencies [2], it is still topical as it was in the program of the Core Facility Satellite Meeting of the 15th international ELMI meeting in 2015. Due to the increasing complexity of the instrumentation used for confocal and high-end wide-field flu-