A generalized service-oriented architecture for remote control of scientific imaging instruments

Scientific imaging instruments are used in a variety of disciplines to gather vital data for research and study. Specifically, in the biomedical field various types of biological imaging instruments, such as electron microscopes and light microscopes, are used everyday to acquire 2D and 3D datasets for further understanding of biological structures. Remote operation or "teleoperation" of instruments has become a popular solution for research scientists to acquire and share data across research domains separated by geographical barriers. A generalized software architecture solution is presented in this paper to use emerging software technologies to develop a reusable framework to easily integrate instruments for remote-operation in a safe and secure fashion. Web services have emerged as a popular technology to provide software applications with a framework to achieve interoperability and integration with other applications. This generalized software architecture was developed to take advantage of Web service middleware technology and to provide a solution for easily plugging in scientific imaging instruments for teleoperation. The architecture has also incorporated grid technology to achieve a more scalable and robust solution for handling the enormous data sets produced from these instruments. Finally a set of client libraries is presented to demonstrate a useful API for developers to quickly develop a graphical user interface to communicate and acquire data from these instruments