George's Recent History and Images

December 10, 2006

Three years since this page was last updated ... I moved from CHLA to City of Hope, and now on to Sacramento.

Multi-Probe Microscopy (http://home.earthlink.net/~mpmicro/mpmicro.zip) is over 1500 pages.

PubSpectra is online ( http://home.earthlink.net/~pubspectra/ ) and Carl Boswell and I published a Cytometry article about it and Carl's spectral graphing website (see PubSpectra).

September 2003

Another year gone by since my last update...

Multi-Probe Microscopy (http://home.earthlink.net/~mpmicro/mpmicro.zip) is almost to 900 pages.

I have been a co-author on three peer reviewed papers: Chantrain et al, Xang et al and Xang et al. Please see my home page for details or check out my Biography page.

I am collaborating with Dr. Car Boswell, U. Arizona, on the next generation of his spectral traces for fluorescent dyes web site (sorry, not online yet). Click here for Carl's original web site. I had nothing to do with his original site, except to email him a "well done" comment. For version 2, I'm collecting the spectral data, Carl and his UA colleagues are handling the database, web server/web interface design.

I also thought it would be nice to add Tiki Goddess to this page. She is shown below (scroll down further for her 'mate', Tiki God or click here) or click on her icon in the left hand navigator bar click here for a full page image of Tiki Goddess.

October, 2002

Been an eventful spring and summer. I'm writing this on Monday October 28, the morning after daylight losing time ended (or started?). Nice to drive to work in daylight, though I suspect driving home in darkness will not be so fun.

Let's see... at work we upgraded our Leica DMRA to a Leica DMRXA; we've started to use our Leica TCS SP confocal microscope a lot more (if you have LCS 2.770 or 2.871, ask Leica for a newer version. We currently use 2.968 but were told after the service person installed it that they stopped distributing...should have a new version in November). Our local Leica rep, Layla from McBain Instruments, recently demo'd the "gliding stage" for our Leica MZ FL III stereomicroscope...$300 "no brainer" purchase". Layla also briefly demo'd the new Leica stereo 2x lens (NA of 0.285, I believe). We also plan on purchasing the 2x lens. It will go on the MZ's second lens mount -- we have the Meyer Instruments "on axis" dual objective lens adapter. This clever gizmo lets us shift the objective to under the right eye "lenslet" so that we can acquire vertical Z-series. A second benefit is that it mounts 2 lenses. We currently have the standard 1x and a 0.4x lens. I anticipate we will use the 1x and 2x, but since the full range of the 1x is covered by the 0.4x + 2x, we might eventually settle on that (have to buy the lens first). For image acquisition on the MZ, we use Compix SimplePCI (5.0 beta, www.c-imaging.net) with a Hamamatsu ORCA-ER scientific grade digital CCD camera. Performance and price wise, SimplePCI kicked butt on Media Cybernetics Image Pro+ (4.0 or 4.5) and MetaMorph 4.0 and 4.5. SimplePCI is also the first imaging software to support the MZ focus drive.

We've been having a lot of error messages with our Polaroid SprintScan 4000 when using our Meyer Instruments Pathscan Enabler. The SprintScan was $2000 when we bough it two years ago. It has been superceded by the 4000Plus which is now $1200 (and Polaroid got out of the scanner business as part of their attempt to recover from bankruptcy). The SprintScan repair cost is guesstimated at $400-600, so when a Polaroid service rep mentioned that an alternative was to upgrade (trade-in) to the 4000Plus for $650, another no-brainer (especially since the 4000Plus uses the professional grade SilverFast Ai). FYI - the SprintScan 4000 uses the same insides as the Microtek ArtixScan 4000TF, and both can use the PathScan Enabler. ... Speaking of the PathScan, Christophe Chantrain, Yves DeClerck and I have an article in press at J. Histochem. Cytochem. on quantitative immunohistochemistry with the PathScan (now published: Chantrain et al 2003). One of my favorite Pathscan images is our Image Core mascot: Tiki God (see below or click here for a full page version of Tiki God or scroll up or click here for Tiki Goddess).

Please email me (gmcnamara@earthlink.net) if you have trouble figuring out the parts of our Tiki God. A couple of hints: the bright red feature is a heart, the nasty grin is liver. On second thought, considering that I've never taken an anatomy class, you would probably be better off asking someone who has.

If you've had trouble finding my temporal area map (TAM) write-up, click here for information on TAM and TAM histograms.

My window was fixed mid-May 2002. My office then felt stuffy!

April, 2002:

Busy, busy, busy. Too busy to do much with this web site. I was pretty good about updating our intranet site (//shelia/image for my colleagues at CHLA), until May 2001 when my server died for a month. After that I was busy trying to get a confocal like gizmo called the OptiGrid working. That took until January 2002 to get resolved (we sent it back because it turned out not to be suitable for our multi-user environment -- your mileage may be better .. or try Zeiss's Apotome). Then I finally got back to the intranet site. On March 11, 2002, 9:30 am, something smashed my office window as shown below (I suspect a terrorist pigeon, since it seemed a bit early in the day for an L.A. drive by shooting and my office is on the 10th floor).

Made a nice stained glass effect until the wind picked up and the glass fell out (and in). Fortunately I'm in L.A., not MN, WI, MI, or even PA, and the window fasts east, away from the occasional rainstorm (yes, L.A. does get rain). Talk about distractions!

November, 2000:

I've spent the last several months deciding what equipment to buy for our Image Core, ordering the equipment, installing and learning the equipment. I have also been learning how to handle running a Windows NT server domain, workstations, and our Mac G4. Much of my time has been spent with Microsoft Front Page 2000 setting up our web site (sorry, it's an intranet, not visible from outside CHLA).
I'm finally taking the time to update my Earthlink home page.

March, 2000:

I moved to LA to be the Imaging Scientist at Childrens Hospital Los Angeles' (www.chla.org) new Imaging Core, after 2+ years at Applied Spectral Imaging, Inc. (ASI, www.spectral-imaging.com), of Carlsbad, CA. My first day was March 20, 2000 (more on this below). I wish my colleagues at ASI and all my customers the best. I look forward to helping bio-medical researchers and clinicians at Childrens get their work done.

February, 2000:

I've been the "keeper" of the spectral imaging reference list at ASI. You can see a recent version by going to http://home.earthlink.net/~geomcnamara/refs.pdf (I'm especially fond of the table of over 100 cell lines that have been SKY'd).

Check out my Multi-Probe Microscopy application note. This is 280+ pages of stuff that I want find quickly, at http://home.earthlink.net/~geomcnamara/mpmicro.pdf (over 1 Mb file, so be patient while it loads in your browser).

November & December, 1999:

My first two patents (www.uspto.gov) were issued!

6,007,996 In situ method of analyzing cells. G. McNamara; D. Soenksen; D. Cabib; R.A. Buckwald. Assignee: Applied Spectral Imaging Ltd. Filed: July 27, 1998; Issued December 28, 1999. SPY 2 Patent

5,995,645 Method of cancer cell detection. D.C. Soenksen; G. McNamara, Y. Garini, N. Katzir. Assignee: Applied Spectral Imaging Ltd. Filed: December 4, 1997; Issued: November 30, 1999. SPY 1 Patent

We also have a patent pending on "spectral un-mixing (SUN)" for spectral pathology (SPY). More on SUN after the patent(s) issues!

Previously...

For earlier stuff, you can try asking me.

This page was last updated on 12/10/06 .