Upon its inception in 1964 as the Optical Sciences Center, only M.S. and Ph.D. degrees were offered, with a core curriculum consisting of five courses plus a few electives. Since then the Center has become a college within the University of Arizona, offering an ABET accredited BS degree in Optical Sciences and Engineering, M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Optical Sciences, and a number of graduate certificates. The development of the curriculum for each of these degrees and certificates is discussed as well as how each curriculum attempts to meet the differing goals of the degrees offered.
The B.S., M.S., Ph.D., and distance learning programs at the University of Arizona's Optical Sciences Center have all undergone significant changes during the last two years. The rationale behind these program and curriculum changes are discussed, particularly for the undergraduate program, which recently received ABET accreditation.
The broad scope and interdisciplinary nature of optics makes it difficult to develop an optics curriculum with sufficient breadth and depth to adequately teach the material one would like a graduating student to know, and to effectively prepare them for career in optics. The University of Arizona's Optical Sciences Center offers M.S. and Ph.D. graduate programs as well as an undergraduate B.S. program, with each of these programs having distinctly different goals and curricula. The primary intent of the Ph.D program is to provide the student with a broad basic optics education plus in-depth education and research experience in a sub-field of optics, while the primary intent of the M.S. program is to provide students with either an in-depth education in a particular optics sub-field or a broad basic optics education. The undergraduate program prepares students for an industrial optics career at the junior engineer level, with tracks or minors that allow a student to also acquire competence in any one of several related fields. In this paper, the various curricula and related examinations that have been developed for these three programs are discussed, along with the considerations that drove their development, their successes, and their shortcomings.
Confocal microscopy, in comparison to conventional microscopy, offers a narrower point-spread function, the rendition of phase structures in contrast, and high axial resolution. Of these, the capabilities of optical sectioning and the three-dimensional imaging of cells and tissues have attracted the most interest. The literature offers a number of studies exploring the factors affecting depth of field in confocal microscopy. In this article, the three-dimensional representation of fluorescence imagery is examined and the design of a laser scanning confocal fluorescence microscope with enhanced depth discrimination is described.
The performance of a multiprocessor computer system in histopathology applications was studied. Specifically, timing studies have been done on an operational multiprocessor, the Heidelberg Polyp, running expert system-guided scene segmentation and image analysis software. A number of actual and potential system bottlenecks and methods of attack for removing them are discussed.
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