Acquisition with data compression

If you want to acquire your data with lossless compression, go to Tools > Options > Acquisition > Data Compression and make sure that Zstd (lossless) is selected.

  1. You have started ZEN with the necessary licenses and set up your hardware.
  2. You have set up an acquisition experiment with one or two Airyscan SR tracks. The FCS functionality for Airyscan is only available, if you have set up a suitable experiment with supported objective and laser line(s), see also Overview Supported Laser Lines. Note that if you have added two Airyscan tracks, the one currently selected in the Imaging Setup or Channels tool is the main track for the spot measurement, the other is considered the second track.
  1. On the Acquisition tab, in the Imaging Setup tool, click Dynamics Profiler.
  2. The Align Airyscan Detector step of the wizard opens.
  3. Click Adjustment.
  4. An automatic adjustment of the Airyscan detector starts and the button changes to a Stop button.
  5. If the automatic adjustment fails, dedicated controls are displayed on the left to manually configure the detector adjustment.
  6. Use the controls on the left side to adjust your Airyscan detector.
  7. The Quality and Status of the detector is displayed and updated on the left side.
  8. When the detector adjustment is successfully completed, the Snap Reference Image step opens automatically.
  9. Use the options of the step to set up the acquisition of the reference image. You can also start a continuous acquisition by clicking Continuous and change the parameters with direct visual feedback.
  10. If you click Continuous, a continuous acquisition starts. To continue, you have to click Stop.
  11. If you have set up your experiment with two tracks and want to acquire the reference image with both, activate Second Track.
  12. The laser setting for the second Airyscan track is displayed if you need to adjust them, the Gain slider is active for both tracks.
  13. Click Snap Reference Image.
  14. Your reference image is acquired with the current settings.
  15. Click Next.
  16. The Set Up Acquisition Spots step opens.
  17. In the Spots section, click + (activated by default) and click on your spots of interest in the reference image. Note that you can add a maximum of ten spots.
  18. The spots are added to the experiment and displayed in the list on the left.
  19. If you want to evaluate an individual spot, select it in the list and click Evaluate Spot. You can also move the spot during evaluation. You can also change the z-position of the spot during evaluation. However, note that the reference image does not adjust to the new z-position. In this case we recommend creating a new reference image by clicking Snap.
  20. Set up the parameters for your time series experiment, including the measurement time. Note that the maximum for spot measurement is 300 seconds.
  21. Click Start Experiment to start the time series experiment for all spots.
  22. The scan experiment starts. The data is displayed in the table and charts in the Center Screen Area.
  23. After the experiment is finished, the wizard closes automatically. If you have activated Create a Reference Image after Spot Measurement, a second reference image (Post Experiment image) is acquired after the spot experiment and before closing the wizard.
  1. The Dynamics Profiler document is displayed in the main user interface of ZEN. You can now save it and analyze the data with the help of the three dedicated views.
  2. Dynamics Profiler documents are also supported by ZEN Connect, see ZEN Connect.
  3. If you have activated Keep Positions and Keep Acquisition Settings in the last wizard step, the spot positions and acquisition settings are taken over to the user experiment and are available for the next acquisition with the wizard.
  4. If you open the Dynamics Profiler document in the Info view, you can see the metadata of the spot experiment. If you want to see the metadata for the reference image, open it as a separate image in ZEN, see Opening the Reference Image as Separate Image.