Microdensitometers and Data Processing for Electron Microscopy

Most of the information obtainable from transmission electron microscopy is lost in the course of normal ‘print and look’ handling -or at least made difficult to retrieve. Not only is there an actual degradation of information, but operations such as the measurement of areas etc. are then carried out manually at great cost in time, and loss of accuracy. One of the main causes of loss of accuracy is the understandable reluctance of competent persons to do a great deal of highly repetitive work. Unfortunately in order to get good error bounds in most cases of interest multiple measurements must be made. Data processing technology is now sufficiently developed to make automatic picture processing an attractive and realizable goal. While this is not specifically a paper on image processing, some simple and possibly generally useful algorithms will be presented.The first step in any data processing schema is data acquisition. In the case of transmission electron microscopy several methods are available, some with advantages in unique situations.