Supply and Maintenance of a Confocal Laser Scanning Microscope

The new, more rapid, kidney cancer pathway to shorten the diagnostic journey and time for patients requires a confocal laser scanning microscope designed for the analysis of diagnostic biopsies. We plan to extend the use in the future to other cancer types and also to the assessment of tumour margins during surgery. The system must provide the following essential functionalities:

1. Enable pathological diagnosis of biopsies during tumour assessment.
2. Allow remote access capability to enable synchronous pathology assessment of

images from a remote location

3. The confocal microscope will be able to used with samples taken for examination

directly after a biopsy or tumour excision in surgery with the following capabilities:

3.1 Tissue preparation, staining time and scanning process for sample

examination to be below 10 minutes.

3.2 Outcome from use of the device in determining the biopsy histology will allow

real-time provisional histological diagnosis (i.e. immediately after staining)

including adequacy of biopsy (i.e. is there viable tumour tissue present?)

permitting treatment planning at the same-day MDT and ultimately faster

patient treatment.

4. Have a multi-channel sample slide tray for examination, allowing:

4.1 staining and imaging using a 488 nm or within similar range for excitation

channel

4.2 staining of a second excitation channel to excite at a second wavelength.

5. Optimised system for small samples at high resolutions with the following

characteristics:

5.1 High resolution will have clear image contrast and defined cellular detail

5.2 Enabled for use in deep tissue imaging

6. Digital

6.1 File transfer using DICOM

6.2 Other data formats to be included; HL7, PDF and XML

6.3 Storage methods (Cloud)