Meeting Abstract
Imaging surface features in three dimensions is often a challenging prospect in biology because many biological surfaces are soft, slimy, or transparent, and surfaces support complex three-dimensional topographies. Traditional techniques such as atomic force microscopy (AFM) provide data at very small scales, but imaging 3D surfaces on the millimeter to centimeter scale can be challenging and time consuming. Here, we showcase a new surface imaging technique able to calculate 3D surface topography with high accuracy on surfaces measuring up to 2 cm across with no image tiling and no z-stacks. Imaging takes ca. 30 seconds to complete and a full 3D surface rendering takes ca. 1 minute. Scans result in approximately 18 million total data points, each with x, y, and z coordinates, permitting highly accurate analyses of the surface. We will present images from a wide variety of biological surfaces, including mammal skin, plant leaves, and fish skin, revealing a tremendous variety of surface morphologies. We also illustrate how this approach can be used to image mucus covered surfaces, and we show several different quantitative metrics that can be extracted from these analyses. Finally, we illustrate steps for 3D printing surfaces measured by this technique.
