Yokogawa's venture into HCS...

[Joe Trask]

Yokogawa's venture into HCS...

On St.Patrick's Day of this year I had the opportunity to get a sneak
preview of the new high-end instrument made by Yokogawa. Of course
many of you know Yokogawa is the maker of the Nipkow confocal spinning
disk hardware components that attaches to Leica, Nikon, Olympus,
Zeiss, and other microscope platforms. The new instrument is called
“Cell Voyager” and is described as a high-throughput cytological
discovery system. In my humble opinion this is the most advanced
high content imaging instrument hardware that has come on the market
in years, but the software algorithms, data analysis and management is
still unknown until benched marked against other established
solutions. The Cell Voyager instrument was commercially released only
in Japan earlier this year; unfortunately the current literature is
only in Japanese so I scanned the front cover brochure (Picture of
Yokogawa CV6000 instrument.jpg) to give you a glimpse of the huge
instrument. The footprint dimensions for model# CV6000 is 2450W X
1440D X 1600H (mm); similar to the GE InCell 3000. One half of the
system is a built-in incubator housing 8 carousels hotels each holding
24 plates for an impressive 192 plate capacity. Environmental
conditions in the incubator are regulated with temperature setting
between 35 and 42oC and 5% CO2. It does not appear the percentage of
CO2 is adjustable. The relative humidity is as high as 90%. As
expected with a high-end system, a liquid handling control is
incorporated allowing liquid dispensing of desired material using a
single channel pipetting device with either 20-100ul or 2-20ul
disposal tips.

As you might expect from Yokogawa, Cell Voyager is equipped with
latest spinning disk technology (CSU-X1) imaging 2,000 frames per
second. There are 3 independent CCD cameras (EMCCD) at capturing
images at a full 1000x1000 pixel resolution or 2x2 binning for fast
acquisition. Cell Voyager uses a combination or selective image and
laser based autofocusing algorithm routine to find objects. To
increase throughput two plates are shuffled on the deck between the
incubator plate hotel and the scanning station. With the combination
of these enhanced hardware components and a high speed stage, Cell
Voyager is capable of capturing 100 images per minute at the highest
speed or a 3 color (channel) 384-well plate in about 4 minutes. A
choice of either confocal, widefield, or phase contrast imaging
capture is available. A 100W halogen bulb is available for bright-
field; laser lines are 405, 488, 532, 635nm and an optional 561nm
line; I believe a 100W Hg bulb is also available as an option for UV
excitable fluors. Cell Voyager CV6000 has a 6 position turret that
allows installation of Olympus objectives from 10 to 60X dry. No
water or oil objectives were mentioned. Lower magnification
objectives such as the 5X and possible smaller were mentioned as
possibilities in the near future.

I cannot give you an exact cost to purchase the Cell Voyager but a
rough estimate is about $2M (USD) for a fully loaded system.
The good news for those who like the concept of this instrument design
from Yokogawa is the manufacturing of a “research grade” for about
$500K (USD). The research grade instrument only holds 8 plates in the
environmental controlled incubator; also it is only equipped with 1
EMCCD camera therefore the throughput is decreased for multicolor
scans.

More information will be added as information becomes available.

Joe Trask

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